graeme.blog

Category: toreview

  • Goodbye Google Reader

    So Google Reader is going. It’s a shame, I’ve had so much use out of it, but in the last couple of years I’ve almost completely stopped. I just use Twitter now. To me, part of the art of Twitter is to follow enough of the right people so that you probably won’t miss a story that would interest you. Groupthink determines if like minds will bubble the important to my attention. It does save me a lot of time reading things I don’t want to to read.

    The other thing to note with Google Reader’s demise is how they are going about closing it. They have given three months notice, and they link to the tool they have had set up for ages that allows you to remove all your data cleanly, in a format that you can use elsewhere (for me mainly, the OPML file I need for all my subscriptions should I ever set up a feed reader again). I can remember other useful services closing, including Google ones in years gone by, where this data transporting was between hard and impossible. They definitely need a little commendation for doing that.

    2014 post update

    Digg released a nice clone of Google Reader, branded as Digg Reader. If you want to carry on as before, use that!

  • For Your Love – The Yardbirds

    Don’t know why I’ve got such a connection to this song, just seems embedded in me. And this page too.

  • New Year’s walk in South Park

    South Park, New Year's Day, 20013

    Photo from a walk in South Park, Oxford, 2013

  • The mid-life crisis officially starts NOW.

    So I appear to have bought a bass guitar. This is an unexpected development for the year. I wasn’t planning on it at all, although I’d started to have favourable feelings about the idea of trying to learn bass guitar a little while ago after I discovered that I preferred following basslines to lead guitar on Rock Band et al. It was a thought that clearly lingered with me.

    And now I’ve gone past 40, and seen the only Olympics I’m ever likely to see in my country, I think my mid-life crisis has started and forced me to buy it. I have planned for said crisis, I’ve thought through the possible routes:

    • Affair – costly, too much organisation
    • Leather trousers – stumpy legs
    • Ponytail – not with my hair. I’m holding back the Hulk Hogan haircut for late 50s
    • Motorbike – costly, I’ll kill myself, q.v. leather trousers
    • Tattoo – this was the one I was planning on doing, I have a design in mind, have done for ages. Think I can handle the pain, all good. Just don’t seem to have got round to it yet

    So my brain and my credit card skipped through the plan and went with bass guitar instead. The actual persuading factor was the release of a new game, Rocksmith. It’s the same sort of logic as Rockband, except you have to use an actual guitar or bass, and it’s designed more as guitar tutor through gaming. Exactly the sort of thing I can get behind. Although I’m going to try and do non-game learning and practice too. It arrives tomorrow, and I can’t wait to start.

  • Bowie on the Internet

    Today Jack Schofield tweeted an old article from the Guardian in 1999, Tomorrow’s Rock ‘n’ Roll , where David Bowie talks to Emma Brockes about his recently-discovered love for the internet. It’s a fascinating document of the time for me, a few months before I started working “in the internet” (for want of a better description) and at a point where I was starting to create my own sites more, and think deeper about what could be done online. I think it’s worth looking a little closer at a few lines from the interview, as there are some interesting insights into how Bowie saw things developing at the time.

    Something that is very familiar to me is that he started to learn more about the internet when he created his own site, bowieart.com . Just like the early home computer gamers like myself learnt about programming from trying or succeeding in creating our own games, and from inputting code ourselves, I and many others learnt a lot from creating our own sites. There is a bit of a disconnect now with services like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter et al where the creation of content is almost completely separate from the code underneath it. Such a disconnect of course brings them to a much wider audience, but often at the expense of a deeper knowledge of how things work.

    However when when he talks of “The communication between me and my Web audience has become more intimate than its ever been”, it really sounds a lot like the positive side of the experiences many creators have had with Twitter. Twitter isn’t the invention here, it’s simply that I think it’s made that communication even easier, and open to many more than ever.

    What really caught my attention was his understanding then of how the internet could affect music. He talks of how he “would like to see record companies changing their delivery systems so that they could send MP3s (an instant free download) straight to the record stores via an ISDN cable. The stores could then burn the CD for them on site. It would reduce the packaging costs and they would make a fortune out of it”.

    It’s easy to have a bit of a giggle at this, but I think he actually got it in the main. The point to him I think was that the MP3s were already approaching instant, and also that in some ways, they were valueless, 1s and 0s. As he understood it, the difficulty and the aim for the record companies instead was to find a way of making these “free” files have a value, add packaging, add value. It almost seems weird to him that they could charge for the download alone.

    Where he’s absolutely spot on is the remix culture of the web. I’d never really thought of him as part of it, but his personas and reinventions clearly were remix culture, and even his music at times, which he freely admits in the article. And he just gets the issues that came with that and with the increased ability to just steal content

    But on the issue of straightforward piracy, I tend to go with the flow. I am not indifferent to it, but I look on it as a lost cause. The way our society constantly breaks down parameters has led to the disintegration of intellectual property. Whether thats a good thing or a bad thing is to an extent irrelevant, without a doubt things in the future are going to be different.

    He wasn’t the first person to say these things by any stretch, but it is interesting to see someone in retrospect who mainly got it, as say opposed to a Metallica, or almost every record company. All of whom had to pretty much be dragged kicking and screaming into the next century (again, as he predicts they’d have to be)

  • Danica Patrick runs over a shoe

    Does what it says on the tin. Danica Patrick runs over a shoe, loses lead in the NASCAR Nationwide race at Montreal. Right now I’m watching the Atlanta race, and she’s just run over a delaminated tyre husk. No luck this year.

  • Framework for a New Musik Version 0.1

    1. Musik

    Digital. No point in plain natural instruments, their time is done. They’re a bit of a luxury too, an unnecessary expense. All you need is a computer. Garageband. Audacity. Linux. Mac. Whatever works, whatever you have. If you do have an instrument, and you really do want to use it, then fair enough, but in the New Musik it is now a mere input device, on a par with the keyboard. Use it sure. Then record it, get it in, fuck with it.

    What does it sound like? Output. An end result. This diagram explains it:

    Old music & Input & Samples > Computer > GitHub & SoundCloud > New Musik

    Nice and simple. Any questions? No? We’ll move on.

    2. What do I do with it

    Save the separate elements of a track into the New Musik GitHub repository. This is important. It means the New Musik can be built, shared and developed quickly and easily.

    Save the finished track onto SoundCloud. Done. Tell people about it. Use the hashtag #NewMusik . That shows you’re part of it.

    3. How do I make money from it?

    You don’t, yet. Don’t worry, this is the case for music through the ages. By putting it into GitHub, it is now open source, under the GPL V2 license (CHECK THIS). Read up on that. It’s important. The idea is that New Musik will simply begat New Musik. If you’re good at it, you’ll figure out how to make money from it, or someone else will for you. If you’re not good at it, at least you took part, you can say that proudly. If you’re inbetween good and not good, you might contribute something useful to the New Musik, help shape what it is, and be very proud of that. Your contribution will be recorded in your commits, there for music historians to see, rather than debate over. However you’ll get little or no money for that contribution. To quote David Byrne: “Same as it ever was”.

    1.1. Musik (slight return)

    So you do have a question? What does it sound like, really? Basically not like music does now. It might sound a little like what it has previously to how it sounds now, but not very much.

    4. Politics

    Bit of a pain really. Sure, this isn’t a distinctly capitalist plan. However music almost always ends up about money to some extent, if it’s a bit good. And I don’t like to be exclusionary. So the New Musik has no politics at its core at all. It is just a methodology you can apply. Be left. Be right. Try not to be a twat though.

    5. Fashion

    Not really my strong point. Proper hats would be nice.

    6. Versioning

    Back to the GitHub bit. Versioning is handy for creativity, see the before, branch off in different directions, still have all the pieces you started with. Even New Musik itself is versioned. This is 0.1. It can and will change. So should you.

  • Ode to Kiki Dee

    Amazing face, so starry-eyed. Surprise!

    Staring out into the seventies,
    Were you ever there?

    You look like you are,
    Enjoying the colours,

    And then you’re not.
    And then you’re gone.

    No more besides,
    That Elton John.

  • The count

    He sits alone in his spaceship, counting the hours. The minutes, the days and the seconds too, but mainly the hours. They are his focus.

    The more hours he counts, the fewer there are to go. The sooner this mission will be over.

    He is hanging in space, counting. All of space around him, under him, over him, behind him, in front of him. Time is a line, space is where the line sits.

    His ship moves along its own line of time, a curve, a wave, millions of miles long, with known endpoints. The estimated mission time minus the elapsed time equals the time left to go, the time to count.

    The ship’s line is known, programmed, predicted. It could potentially change, but conditions are allowed for, recalculations will take place, the line will adjust and reshape accordingly. This is all done for him, it shows on  a display in every area of the ship. He doesn’t need to count. But he does.

    He trusts the computers, the ship. It isn’t a lack of faith that causes him to count, hope to be more trustworthy than them, catch them out miscounting, prove himself to be more in control of time. They’re far more accurate and effective than him at counting. But he does.

    He just wants to know his own place in time for himself. He checks with the displays to help calibrate himself from time to time. After so long now, his time is getting pretty close to real time, to the ship’s line. This is his time though, his line. In his head, just from feeling time for himself, knowing each hour, marking it. Nodding, adding it to the total, then carrying on.

    His ship floats onwards.

  • Too.Much.Tech.

    Tonight I have found that I have lost a scanner. Well it is definitely in the house. But I cannot see it. For other pieces of tech.

    It is this that has lead me to the realisation that I have too much tech. New Tech. Current Tech. Tech nearing the end of its life. Dead Tech. Retro Tech. Last Gen Tech. Old Media Formats. Remnants. Items copied to digital, and stored, not removed. Things of affectation. Ideas that didn’t work out. Things that might work in future. Prospects, Hopes, Dreams, Dead ideas. All in tech form. All somewhere in this house.

    So the obvious next step is to remove some of them. And instantly that fills me with a dread. What if I might need it? What if I might want it? What if at 3am on Christmas Morning 2031 I suddenly realise I’d quite like to play that old Wonderswan game? What if I want to connect this to that? Or that to the other? What if that screw fits something when I need a screw and I’d got rid of it.

    It is of course a hoarding instinct. And I recognise its dangers, its inherent issues. For one, I can’t find my scanner. But look, whilst I still have devices that have SCART slots, I will need SCART leads. Okay I don’t use them now, of course, I use HDMI or component, as they also have those slots. But I MIGHT need them for something else. Something old. That I’ve bought second-hand, and want to use.

    Alright I’ll admit the Amstrad E@Mailer wasn’t necessary. TEN POUNDS in the charity shop though. It’s not got a cordless phone as part of it, so I can’t plug it into the landline. I like it though, and it has to be plugged in, otherwise it wouldn’t be serving a purpose.

    I’m going to have a sort-out this weekend. Or maybe next.