22 Friday Aug 2008
Posted in General
The Daily Telegraph have written any interesting article about Faithless’ Sister Bliss who recently released a solo effort called Nightmoves.
The article can be found at : Telegraph – Sister Bliss. The Nightmoves album is available here.
22 Friday Aug 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
The International Herald Tribune has interesting piece on Peter Gabriel and his subtle but important influence on music in the digital age – Cutting edge rocker blazes trail in digital age – International Herald Tribune.
22 Friday Aug 2008
Posted in General
It looks like the Imperium has arrived at the planet earth, or at least San Francisco, checkout this video footage …
The footage is very clever.
21 Thursday Aug 2008
Posted in Technology
As someone who is known amongst friends to work in the computer industry I often get asked to help sort out people’s problems. Talking someone over the phone to deal with problems can be difficult, and often it is easier to understand and solve a problem if you can see the machine which brings with it a host of practicality issues. Remote management tools aren’t a new thing, but having one that doesn’t cost you anything to help friends and family with and works over HTTP/HTTPS without needing to know the IPs involved is important an relatively new.
MasterNewMedia.org has a nice little article with plenty of links to tools and services in this area with a review of what they offer which can be found at Remote PC Support Tools: A Mini-Guide, worth checking out. I’ll be trying out TeamViewer which is free for personal use doesn’t require client installation and a small app at my end to sort things out. Good security – the client has to send you details independently of the tool for connecting to them (they suggest the phone). The client tool doesn’t need to be installed – just launched via the website.
21 Thursday Aug 2008
Posted in General
This month carries good news on fuel prices – they’re dropping! Although the drop is being pushed by a price war between the supermarkets more than the drop in the barrel price. This does make the price drops a lot more variable and this is reflected in the latest figures having the highest regional variation since I’ve started doing the measurements. It is also worth pointing out, that the drop so far has only taken fuel prices back by a couple months rather than to last year’s price plus annual inflation.
Source figures courtesy of the AA.
20 Wednesday Aug 2008
Posted in Technology
This article (Computer games industry threat to downloaders: ‘pay up or we’ll sue’) makes up the front page of the The Times today along with a photo of Christine Ohuruogu the Team GB athlete. It is surprising such an announcement made the front pages of the paper, but also the fact that compared to the downloading of movies and music the games industry has been relatively quiet about the illegitimate downloading activity. It is interesting to observe that the print edition of the article acknowledges that often people will download games and never play them, begging the question as to what proportion of the downloads do actually represent lost revenue?
I hope that the games industry don’t make the mistakes that the music industry (particularly the RIAA) have fallen into which has done the industry no favours at all.
19 Tuesday Aug 2008
Posted in Music
The Chemical Brothers have released an EP on iTunes called Midnight Madness which includes a Soulwax remix of Hey Boy, Hey Girl.
18 Monday Aug 2008
Posted in Music
After a hectic weekend, I’m catching up with news to discover the sad news that the great Jerry Wexler has passed on. I’ll not write reams about his exploits, but recommend you read about them your self, but looking at his book – Rhythm & Blues (also called My Life in Rhythm & Blues), if you wan the shortened details then check out Stereophile: Jerry Wexler Dead at 91.
12 Tuesday Aug 2008
Posted in Music
Thanks to BOfH for bringing a very interesting article about a a music fan in the US who is bringing his collection of 78’s into the twenty first century by converting them to MP3. The full article can be found at Listening Post from Wired.com. Clif Bolling has been ripping his notable collection of old 78s to MP3 and posting them to his website so that he could access the MP3s from anywhere he wants. Hits in the website had been low until information about Cliff’s activity hit Reddit and StumbleUpon at which point interest and the number of hits his site had went through the roof.
The interesting thing is issues of copyright, it would seem that concern was not over possible copyright breach; Cliff is working on the principle of no takedown notice must mean all is ok – a little naive, but given the likelihood that this material isn’t available anymore (some of the recordings at 70+ years old) it would be hard to prove he has inflicted losses on the record companies. Given the copyright risk, it is strange to read that Cliff’s wife was more concerned about how the music might be perceived as the recordings weren’t subject to modern political correctness or legislation over sexism or racism.
It will be interesting to see if the interest in Cliff’s efforts result in the master recordings for some of this material are tracked down, cleaned up and made available through more legitimate channels. In the meantime we can probably look upon Cliff’s efforts as twenty first century equivalent to the great archivist Alan Lomax.
12 Tuesday Aug 2008
Posted in Music
Paul Weller’s next single from the 22 Dreams album is going to be ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘. The digital release will be on the 18th and the physical formats will follow a week later.
The CD single is released with three tracks with a radio edit of ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ along with ‘Push It Along’ and ‘Big Brass Buttons’ featuring Bobby Gillespie.
There will also be collectible 7″ vinyl options, the first coming in a Green Island Records 7″ bag with ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ Radio Edit backed by ‘Push It Along’. The second comes in an Artworked 7″ bag with an acoustic version of ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ backed by an acoustic version of ‘Pretty Flamingo’. You can order all the formats as part of a multi-buy special offer for just £4.99 exclusively from Townsend Records here.
