| Hey MTV! Bring back 120 Minutes! |
[Apr. 17th, 2009|10:32 am] |
The only show on the MTV network that actually showed cool videos, and new music, and it got canned. Where will I get my Rex The Dog fix now? Who else will show Of Montreal on TV? Remember your roots, MTV!
And no, Kings Of Leon 20 times a day doesn't count as alternative.
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|10:37 pm] |
I've been tidying today. Thrown out a pile of stuff that I'm never going to use again. This is very unlike me - I tend to hoard.
Now I have some tidiness and order, I've been looking at bare walls, and thinking about getting something to put on them. I like movie posters, but I wanted to get something more unusual than the ones that get reprinted. That means finding someone who has kept the original printing, which of course gets harder (and therefore more expensive) for older or more obscure films. I originally wanted the chinese poster for City Hunter, but it seems that movie posters aren't as collectible in Hong Kong as here - or perhaps just not old trashy Jackie Chan movies. I found some Jacques Tati posters that were nice too, but they're antiques now, so pretty expensive.
So I'm looking at art prints now. I kind of wanted a Mondrian print, but all the ones I can find are so clean and crisp. I know that's supposed to be the point, but I found the only time I really 'got' a Mondrian was when I saw one in San Francisco. It was the typical white+grid+coloured fields thing, but what made it so cool was how grubby it was. The black tape was peeling, and there were fingerprints on the white - it was great! Apparently in his later life, Mondrian went so bonkers about clean colours, he painted his houseplants white. I hope that's true.
Anyway, back to the hunt...
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| This is not the hot party I was expecting... |
[Mar. 30th, 2009|09:13 pm] |
A while ago, I finally bought myself the Logitech Squeezebox that I've been talking about for ages, to coincide with finishing off the ripping to FLAC of all my CDs. The squeezebox is a nifty bit of kit, which is basically a network-connected MP3 streamer with nice menus and nice software. You can either talk directly to the internet (via the SqueezeNetwork portal) and use it as a fancy radio, or you can connect it to your own PC and run Logitech's SqueezeCenter software.
The SqueezeCenter software is quite nice - it indexes all your music and all that usual stuff, but it also has a nice web interface that lets you control multiple players, and even synchronise them. There's a good plugin development community offering extra goodies like clever searching, and last.fm scrobbling. It installs nice and easily on Windows, and there's a port for FreeBSD (it's open source, and written in perl).
So, with all that going, I wanted to get a smaller quieter NAS-like thing to store all my tunes on. I did look at actual NAS boxes, since a few of them have SqueezeCenter as a package. The general impression was that they were a bit gutless processor-wise though. So I landed with something based around Sun's ZFS filesystem, which promises decent performance RAID-like features. It's available on a few platforms - FreeBSD, Linux, OS X and of course, Solaris. However, it's read-only on OS X, and I couldn't find anything talking about the FreeBSD or Linux versions that didn't mention terrible performance or "random data loss". Those seemed like bad things for a filesystem. It had to be Solaris.
Having found a couple of articles about building Solaris-based NAS boxes, I settled on a dual-core Intel Atom board, a laptop drive for the system, and a 1TB WD caviar green drive for the data (to be come 4 drives at a later date), with OpenSolaris 2008.11.
OpenSolaris is reassuringly familiar to anyone who's installed CentOS or Ubuntu lately - it has just the same Gnome look&feel - but it's a rather different under the surface. It has it's own package manager, service manager, and pretty much anything else manager. It comes with DNS turned off by default. It comes without compilers by default. The hardware compatibility list is rather short.
I've actually got as far as a networked CIFS (windows sharing) server now, although I still haven't gotten to the bottom of where Sun have mangled up perl so that CPAN only sort of works. The Atom hardware is nice, small and quiet. The Sun software ranges from pretty annoying to just OK, with the one exception of ZFS. If only it worked on FreeBSD reliably, I would have been a lot happier...
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 22nd, 2009|08:44 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Les Savy Fav - Comes & Goes | ] |
This has been a loong week... last weekend was the stag for one of my college buddies, so that was travelling, drinking, doing manly things[0], more drinking, more travelling. Work was a week compressed into 2 days followed by an all-nighter for the excellent Girl Talk at the Scala on Wednesday, along with 3 decent support acts too. Daedalus had a monome to launch all his loops - very funky toy, and a good act too.
Thursday was mostly recovering from Wednesday. Saturday was shopping for the same wedding, plus rugby (I'm an honorary Welshman in that regard), plus another gig with my mum & dad - King Pleasure & The Biscuit Boys, in Windsor. They're a pretty amazing blues/swing band. I saw them once before at a charity ball thing, about 10 years ago, and they are a great party band. Sadly the CDs don't really capture it.
Then this morning was up at 4:45 to be in docklands for 6am for a planned outage. Ugh.
Much tiredness.
[0] quad-biking, archery, a shooting safari thing and knife throwing |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 27th, 2009|05:43 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Hjaltalin - Goodbye July | ] |
How do. No real news. Eve Online is back in my life for a little while. Completely coincidentally, not much work has been done on other projects. I'm playing with an Arduino, with a view to making a motion-sensitive LED-matrix clock. I'm not playing with it that much though, and the more I look at what I really want it to do, the more it looks like it'll cost £150 in parts (the chips to drive the LED matrix, mainly). I want it to display an abclock, and do other things if you rotate/wiggle it.
I *have* nearly finished re-ripping all my CDs to FLAC, on the other hand, so I can get a little NAS and a Squeezebox sometime soon. It does leave me with somewhere around 1000 CDs I don't really want anymore, though. I think that technically, I should be keeping them. That's a lot of space to take up with this crap.
I used to post so much more... I don't think I really said any more though!
ObSeenBandsList: StereoLab, Animal Collective, Hjaltalin
ObSeeingBandsList: Parts & Labor, Girl Talk (squee!), Emmy The Great, Crystal Stilts, Wavves, ATP vs the Fans. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 14th, 2008|10:28 am] |
Went to Barden's Boudoir in Dalston last night to see Indian Jewelry, who were pretty cool, but the real heroes of the night were These Are Powers - those guys were amazing. Loads of energy, loads of noise, loads of crazy. I want a suitcase full of pedals and gizmos.
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 1st, 2008|02:52 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  chipper | ] |
Just got back from an excellent halloween gig... highlight of my evening was hugging a semi-naked sweaty man as he passed by. It's hard to explain, it's like some kind of cult. I also appear to have picked up a cut above my eye from the mosh, too.
So tonight was fun, and there have been a few good ones recently too, Mogwai (and Fuck Buttons supporting them), M83, Lykke Li and Blitzentrapper were all stand-outs. I got the Upset The Rhythm fler this evening, and we're off to over half the shows on it - all nice cheapy things, but some cool bands- High Places, Jay Reatard, Gentle Friendly...
Anyway, that is my update. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 9th, 2008|11:40 pm] |
Oh, and Ponytail were awesome the other night! Deerhunter this week.
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| You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. |
[Sep. 9th, 2008|11:38 pm] |
I'm currently working my way through 1000 or so CDs, ripping them to FLAC and scanning the covers, for a non-existent HDTV/XBMC jukebox in the future. The physical disks can go in the garage then, and I get a wall back. Sometime down the road, I'll pick up a little ReadyNAS and a Squeezebox or two, and life will be lovely.
It's rather sobering to see how many of these disks have HMV labels on them with full-on old-style pricing though - 16 quid for Dirty Vegas!
EAC chews through the disks OK, and I have to recommend Vuescan, too - it's happily talking to my ancient Umax firewire scanner on Vista, even though Umax themselves don't support it!
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 29th, 2008|11:44 am] |
I seem to be going to a lot of gigs in the next few months... Faust/Shit&Shine, Lykke Li, M83, Stereolab, Mogwai/FuckButtons, Ponytail, Deerhunter, Fujiya & Miyagi, Blitzen Trapper, John Waters, Why?, Abe Vegoda, and Shellac. Phew! Maybe more to come too. Still, live music is fun!
Pondering Slayer at the end of October too. ANGEL OF DEEEAAATH!
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| 1..2..3..4.. |
[Jul. 14th, 2008|04:30 pm] |
Feist on Sesame Street, teaching you to count to four....
You know you've arrived when you get to be a guest on Sesame Street.
One of my fave gigs of 2007... (not with monsters though)
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|04:58 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bouncy | ] |
Here is my pseudo-annual "Glastonbury was great" post.
It was.
Fat Boy Slim Friday night, Cadence Weapon & Jay-Z on Saturday, Crystal Castles, Holy Fuck, Lykke Li, Elbow, Leonard Cohen... loads more, and THEN crazy fake-moustache drag cabaret club and silent disco an ting til dawn. and some excellent circus acts. and lovely people. and strange Danish licorice stuff.
Err, I'm a little bit spacey now. |
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| I has a flavour |
[May. 27th, 2008|11:15 pm] |
This dreary bank holiday weekend was spent on the farm - my girl's a country girl, and we visited her folks on their dairy farm in Pembrokeshire. As a result of that, I got to put up an electric fence on Saturday evening, which is a lot less interesting than it sounds, although a pleasant enough diversion. With the chickens contained, we moved onto Sunday's entertainment - silage.
It's actually kind of cool. If you have livestock, then in the winter they can't eat grass, because it's frozen/gone. So you grow extra fields of grass during the spring/summer, and mow them. Collect up all the cut grass, treat it with some magic to make it ferment, and it also produces acid and pickles itself. Then you can keep it until winter, and use it alongside feed. In practice, it's a LOT of grass - this was around 120 acres worth - and you also have to keep it dryish and airtight. So you have a series of interesting machines to rake it all up, then collect it into trailers and then pile it up inside a very large shed. You need to do all this pretty quickly too, because the weather is a big factor. They had 5 large trailers zipping back and forth, and it only takes 10 minutes or so for the harvester to fill a trailer. Even so, it was a few very long days to collect all the grass. After all that, there was enough to pile around 6-8 metres high, 25 across and 45 along, and dense enough that you can drive a tractor on top of it to get the air out. The next part is what I ended up helping with - sheeting the pit. You have a huge (12x40m) sheet of polythene, and a zillion[*] old car tyres. Start at one end of the pit, unrolling the sheet and weighing it down with tyres to keep the air out and the sheet from acting like a sail. That's actually all there was to it - 3 or 4 hours of hefting tyres off a trailer and wading around on a giant plastic sheet, on a damp humid day in waterproofs. We all got pretty dirty and stinky.
(someone else's explanation - I think I actually got it about right)
The other nice feature of the weekend was feeding week-old calves. They're really sweet, although rather dim. They have figured out that people lead to food, but not exactly how. So they suck on anything person-related that comes in range. At one stage I had one calf sucking on my knuckles, their neighbour sucking my elbow and another having a go at my jeans, all while I was trying to organise *actual* food for them. Silly buggers.
Strangely, I don't actually ache all that much today - I was expecting to suffer after all the hefting and hurling...
[*] maybe not a whole zillion, but it must have been a couple of thousand at least, just by roughly reckoning. |
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| Fact: Programming attracts crazy people |
[May. 17th, 2008|12:04 pm] |
I used to think that Illustrating Basic by Donald Alcock (which is an terrific introduction for non-computer people) was about as quirky as computer textbooks got, before they became Mr Bunny's Cup o Java (which doesn't actually teach you anything at all, although it is extremely bizarre). Alcock's book is a lovely entirely handwritten guide to BASIC as it was in 1977 (still in print now!), so it mentions teletypes and timesharing a little at first, but the actual guts of it is a good introduction to variables, subroutines and basic concepts before going into BASIC itself. I used to recommend to college buddies who were doing Biology and suddenly needed to do data collection things (hi Clara!) in FORTRAN.
Then yesterday I found Why's (poignant) Guide To Ruby, while researching Ruby on Rails. This thing is the work of some sort of madman. There's an actual programming course in Ruby, several different series of cartoons running through it, sidebars discussing the author's many dreams and fantasies, and craft projects. It's awesome. I'm going to read the book and hopefully accidentally learn Ruby along the way.
Update: It has a soundtrack too. WhyTheLuckyStiff is my new hero. |
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| Mo' music, mo' fun |
[May. 16th, 2008|04:29 pm] |
Last night we spent the evening wandering around 20+ venues in Shoreditch, with a foldup map and a wristband, courtesy of Stag & Dagger. It was a pretty good night, during which we saw Atlas Sound (the dude from Deerhunter), Duchess Says (who was really fun), Shitting Fists (who weren't), Jay Reatard, Times New Viking and a handful of random things I don't even know who they were.
Jay Reatard and TNV were both way better than when we saw them last week, which is making me wonder how iffy the sound was at the downstairs room of ATP. I think that seeing a number of those bands in the upstairs room of a pub, so it's not much bigger than our living room, made a lot of difference too. |
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| Posted using LJ Talk... |
[May. 12th, 2008|02:33 pm] |
I just got back from ATP vs Pitchfork at Camber Sands... it's an Indie/Alternative music festival with about 3000 or so people, in a Pontins holiday camp. You get a bed, a shower, a loo of your own, and a door! It's like civilisation, only with loud music and lots of beer and nice people. The actual place has this slightly strange feel about it, because it's all a bit old, but it was a great festival. Didn't see a single 'bad' act either, only differently good ones. Los Campesinos! had a terrific gig with loads of positive energy, but it would be hard to pick a favourite. All the bands clearly enjoy the festival, and you often see them at the other band's gigs. It's just the right size so you don't feel totally lost in a sea of people too.
I even managed to avoid sunburn all weekend! |
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| Randomness |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|05:58 pm] |
How does one go about manufacturing something? I want to make a plastic thing with printing on it - flat, but with some embossing. Like a ruler or similar. Actually, I want to make a few hundred.
(I just found out that I can post through Pidgin. Maybe I'll update more...) |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 23rd, 2008|04:31 pm] |
I had this week off work, mainly because I have to use the time up before April, but partly because it was half term. Since I didn't really have anything better to do, I've spent quite a lot of time working on Weathermap, which is nearly ready for another release, and a bit playing with Visual Studio.NET 2008. I managed to get a pretty decent WPF (aka SilverLight-ish) image viewing app going in an afternoon, including guessing my way through C# and XAML. The .NET foundation libraries are pretty nice - I'll have to learn a bit more C# I reckon.
My only other achievement for this week is to take a dark-background portrait of myself in a lit room, while playing with my camera and reading this. Just before christmas, I got myself a Nikon D40X, and then happened across strobist.com, which is a blog/tutorial site for off-camera lighting. It's a very engaging read, and one day I'll get some more time to learn this stuff. So far, it's limited to some OK 'product' photos of random things around the house, and the self-portrait mentioned above. The camera is very nice, incidentally. I've never really had a nice camera before, not counting my ancient Canon A1 which was very cool in 1979 but not so much these days. |
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