Alan Jeffrey

Delia Derbyshire / Warp

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:32:59 GMT

Lost Delia Derbyshire "experimental dance" recording from the late 1960's. Derbyshire says "Forget about this, it's for interest only". Paul Hartnoll, says "That could be coming out next week on Warp Records." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm

Scotland Yard Gospel Choir

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:47:28 GMT

Went out to see Scotland Yard Gospel Choir last night, not knowing much about them. Was very pleasantly surprised, they turn out to be a very Pulp/Smiths-influenced band, with the same style of self- and everybody-else-deprecating lyrics. Weird hearing Jarvis Cocker intonation from a Chicago local. Their MySpace samples don't give a flavour of their live show (apart perhaps from Aspidistra, so make sure to play that one if you do the clicky thing on the above link).

The event turned out to be a six-act mini-festival, notable for a couple of the support acts. Gay4Girls is a SYGC spin-off, featuring a blistering wall of guitars (3 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drums): this was their first ever gig, not that you'd know it from the performance. Northern Room were a really good band in a genre I hate: the U2 / Simple Minds mega-stadium rock blech. They had all the air of being 2009's Arcade Fire. Bizarre hearing that style of music in a small venue with about 100 people in the room, you expect the other 999,900 audience members to be behind you somewhere.

The gig went on for four hours, my feet hurt when I got back home at midnight.

Steve Whitaker 1955-2008

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:50:22 GMT

I'm shocked to hear of Steve Whitaker's death, far far too early. I knew him from B-APA, Caption, the London Cartoon Center, and working on the design of Comics Forum. Most recently we'd been posting each other comments on photos, artwork, etc. His last flickr posting was a superb vectorization of a naff photo I'd taken. He was incredibly gifted visually, with a superb eye for colour, a steady brush hand, and a Toth-like sense of where to put the perfect line. Goodbye Steve.

Small child or cackling mad scientist?

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:45:10 GMT


This livejournal	My professional research site

Generated by the mildly amusing Blog Readablity Test. Pointer from Eddie Campbell's blog.

Andy Vectorized

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:44:20 GMT

It's all the craze, this VectorMagic thing. I threw some line art at it to see how it got one, and it must be said I'm not sure I could tell the difference between the original and the vectorized version.

ETA: zoomed in, the vectorizer is doing quite an impressive job...

Getting legacy videos into Quicktime

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:58:52 GMT

Well this only took about three days to write...

ALLWMVFILES = $(wildcard */*.wmv)
RAWWMVFILES = $(wildcard */*raw*.wmv)
WMVFILES = $(filter-out $(RAWWMVFILES), $(ALLWMVFILES))
MP4FILES = $(addsuffix .mp4, $(basename $(WMVFILES)))

%.avi: %.wmv
	mencoder $< -o $@ -ovc x264 -x264encopts bframes=1 -vf harddup -oac faac -faacopts br=160:mpeg=4 -channels 2 -srate 44100 -ofps 30

%.h264: %.avi
	mplayer $< -dumpvideo -dumpfile $@

%.aac: %.avi
	mplayer $< -dumpaudio -dumpfile $@

%.mp4: %.h264 %.aac
	rm -f $@
	mp4creator -create=$*.h264 -rate 30 $@
	mp4creator -create=$*.aac $@
	mp4creator -hint=1 $@
	mp4creator -hint=2 $@
	mp4creator -optimize $@

all: $(MP4FILES)

Then make all and watch the smoke come out the back of the machine.

More memery

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:24:26 GMT

martinskidmore writes a followup to his previous post, suggesting a round of the ever-popular game of "I can't believe they didn't include X", where "they" is Acclaimed Music's top 107 albums of the 1990s, and X is Orbital. How could you include Leftfield, but not etc. etc.

My 10 "I can't believe" artists (I know, the brief was 10 albums, so there was some feature creep...):

Amber, Tri Repetea - Autechre
Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins
When I Was Born for the 7th Time - Cornershop
Dead Cities - Future Sound of London
Autoditacker, Niun Niggung - Mouse On Mars
Green Album, Brown Album, In Sides - Orbital
Songs for Drella - Lou Reed and John Cale
Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Dots and Loops - Stereolab
Dream of 100 Nations - Transglobal Underground
Dubnobasewithmyheadman, Second Toughest in the Infants - Underworld

Truly the 1990s were a time of squeaks and bleeps.

Memery

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:21:15 GMT

Tagged by jinty: seven tracks that have stuck in my head.

My Own Eyes from the storming We'll Never Turn Back by Mavis Staples. This is a track she wrote herself looking back on the civil rights movement, and playing compare and contrast with the aftermath of Katrina. I could just list seven tracks from this album.

Ooh, which track off The Crane Wife (Decemberists), oh let's go for Sons and Daughters. Not sure why I like this album so much, since it's exactly the kind of Jethro Tull folkee rock I usually loathe, and indeed is full of cod salty tales of the sea, crap sharks, etc. but somehow rises above it.

Been reading the 33 1/3 book on Velvet Underground and Nico so I have Waiting for the Man stuck in my head. L likes the book too, when I took her to Reckless Records and picked up a copy from the grown-ups-sweety-rack-at-the-cash-register, she refused to let go of it and sqeaked "banana, banana!"

Lots of kids music I'm afraid, let's go for Miss Mary Mack (yes, really, that Miss Mary Mack) by Erin Flynn from Dreamer of Dreams. Done in a punk-pop stylee, and incredibly addictive. One of the few kiddy songs that I don't immediately press "next track" when it comes up on random play on my iPod.

I've also been trying to convince the girls to listen to what J calls "daddy music" (as in, "Noooooo, daddy music!"). Most success has been with Sgt. Pepper (which has some nostalgia value as it was one of my dad's favourites) and The Box (Orbital, In Sides) which is more danceable-by-toddlers than you'd expect.

Current album on constant-play is P.J. Harvey's White Chalk, which is great but not really earworm music: lo-fi Cocteau Twins is not really hum-along.

Who hasn't already been tagged to do this one? Er, swisstone? jimthespy?

Series 3

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:01:11 GMT

The last of the vanilla DW series 3 R2 DVDs arrived on Monday...

It's still weird watching TV that's a couple of months old, and that arrives in the mail. It's a bizarre mix of the Victorian postal service with shiny 21st century discs that seems kind of appropriate for Who.

Oddly enough, as for everyone else out there on the Interwebs, Human Nature / Family of Blood / Blink are the standouts, made all the more obvious by being a disc on their own. Very handy for people who want to buy just one DVD.

Human Nature made the transfer from the book pretty well, and in fact is improved by having David Tennant's version of John Smith being much more invested in 1913 than the 7th Doctor is -- notably this Smith is very keen on the ROTC and the "school spirit" in general, whereas the novel's is much more of a fish out of water. This makes the sequence of Smith refusing to become the Doctor (which is pretty much missing from the novel) all the more believable. Tennant is really good in Human Nature, to the point that I wish his Doctor was more like his John Smith, it's a bit of a disappointment when the glasses and the cheap sarcasm come back.

There are some "urg" moments in Family of Blood, notably the Doctor's complete out-of-character treatment of the Family, where he comes across as exactly the kind of petty judge-jury-executioner he's normally fighting against. But it's more than made up for by the "war comes to England" sequence, with the bizarre mix of Who, If, and er ambulatory scarecrows.

Blink is, of course, excellent.

The series finale is a bit of a let-down, as I knew it would be. Jacobi does a brilliant job when he's allowed to start being Eeeevilll, and Simms is great when he's playing his part straight. But, oh dear, RTD why does every character have to be so bloody glib? It's nice having the Master actually change character when he regenerates for once, but the Master isn't the Joker, and Simm's version is.

Oh yes, and the same complaints as everyone else: Dobby Doctor, I believe in fairies, etc. etc.

And the usual complaint about the treatment of Martha Jones at the hands of RTD: in Smith and Jones she looks to be a companion to be reckoned with, but by the end of it she's the same love-sick puppy dog (OK, a love-sick puppy dog freedom fighter). I accept RTD's point that old Who had the emotional depth appropriate for an eight year-old, but I'm not sure that RTD's updating to a fifteen year-old is that much of an improvement. We've gone from "ick, girlz" to a show obsessed with who's snogging who, and I can get all that on Smallville thank you very much. At least I can't imagine Donna putting up with any of this, so hopefully it'll all be behind us in season four.

All in all, a big improvement on series two, and probably back on a par with series one.

Electrons

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 01:34:16 GMT

A bit over a day later, and we have electricity again, together with internet access, and the other trappings of civilization. There are still bits of trees everywhere.

Tornado

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:17:55 GMT

Tornado! Downed trees! No electricity! Torches! LJ posting by mobile phone! How thrilling...

Tomato

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:09:46 GMT

We make food. We eat food. Food good.

Coming soon: we make fire, we make wheel, we make wi-fi network upgrade, etc.

Attack of the Coffee Makers

Sat, 05 May 2007 19:27:41 GMT

We broke our coffee maker, so we needed emergency backup.

New! Boots

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 01:32:04 GMT

At a supermarket round the corner from our house.

Egg Hunt

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:26:21 GMT

It was too cold to do an egg hunt outside. Warnings: may contain squeaky parentese; anyone who already knows how to count to four may experience nausea and irritation.

How Could You Not See A Bear?

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:03:02 GMT

Shot by K. Squeaky parentese by me. Hi sdn!

Back and Forth

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:04:02 GMT

Laura! Hold Janine's hand! Laaaaauuuuuurrrrrraaaaa!

In other YouTube news, J has now worked out that those little squares on YouTube pages are thumbnails for other videos, and that if you point at them and say "Watch That!" then you get to watch a new video. Yes, under two and already with the hypermedia.

Polar Bear!

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:36:18 GMT

Polar Bear big! Polar Bear swimming! Eek! (Holds onto trouser leg.)

Also in this set, evidence that photographing otters is difficult.

Dorkiness Prevails

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:59:43 GMT

So, my new addiction is, sad to say lonelygirl15.

I'd kind of ignored it, despite all the press coverage, #1 subscribed channel on youtube, etc. Then a couple of weeks back, I thought, hey ho, let's see what the fuss is about. And now I'm an addict, sigh.

For the rock-hiders, lonelygirl15 started out as a fake vlog on youtube, featuring posts by "Bree", who managed to combine astoundingly well-shaped eyebrows with an interest in Richard Feynman. After a couple of months of is-it-fake speculation, the creators owned up, and the whole pretense of reality has pretty much gone down the drain by now.

So... why do I like it? Well, on many measures, it's not great: the acting is sometimes ropey, the plot is pretty herky-jerky, and the whole Teen Angst thing gets tiresome quite quickly. Its biggest weakness is also it's biggest strength: they're making it up as they go along. It's quite weird seeing a new artform being developed: it's not TV, it's not fan video, it's a weird new thing that doesn't really know what it is.

There are some restrictions: the main one being that it has to happen in "real time", with the videoing, editing and uploading being supposedly done by the characters. There's no anonymous authorial voice, if one of the characters is climbing over a wall, he carries the camera up with him. This produces some weirdness, e.g. watching the characters war-walk around trying to find unprotected WiFi networks they can piggy-back onto to upload the video you are currently watching. And sometimes it breaks down, e.g. when Bree isn't talking to Daniel (who supposedly does her editing for her) but still her videos are edited in the same style. Hmm... But when it works, it's surprisingly effective, and at times has an almost Zapruder film quality about it.

But some of what I really like requires spoilers...

For me, catching up with LG15 via youtube and avoiding the forums, there was a jaw-dropping moment of finding out about the OpAphid / Tachyon Alternate Reality Game (ARG). I knew there was an element of fan interaction, but I'd not realized quite how deep it went, until the point that OpAphid turns up in the videos, and I had to go and check out her videos, and OK wow those were weird. Followed up by the wonderful Alias super-spy moment where Tachyon's theme kicks into Human Ransom and the distinction between the game and the video series vanishes.

The ARG is an expression of the unusual degree of interactivity LG15 has: the creators are monitoring the forums quite carefully, and will respond either as The Creators, or, more often, in character. The forums are very chatty and with a general feeling of community, and produce some odd discussions, e.g. due to the "Bree's religion" subplot there's a fair bit of discussion about Crowley, Thelema, Egyptology, etc., all wrapped up into an ARG which is largely a big crossword / code-breaking puzzle. Reminds me in some ways of playing Call of Cthulhu back in the 1980s, only with a much larger group, and with actual real-life Thelemites chipping in.

So I am currently signed up to the discussion boards, joining in trying to work out what the hell the sequence Tau+Phi, Lambda+Sigma, Theta+Mu, Theta+Eta is meant to mean, and why Theta+Eta is meant to refer to a group of textual critics looking into notions of free will in a Theta+Mu Thelemite/Masonic/Illuminati Big Conspiracy.

How to catch up on LG15: go to http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=lonelygirl15 and note that the editors are very good at getting shots of Bree as the sample image for her vlogs. Then go back to the first vlog First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails, and start watching her videos. Every so often, a new character is introduced with their own youtube account, so you'll end up jumping around a bit. I found the easiest thing to do was to concentrate on Bree's videos, and following the "this video is a reply to" chain back to catch up on the other characters. The style of the videos changes quite drastically after the first few months, so be ready for some bumps in the road. Ooh fun!

Lift Off

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:01:14 GMT

3, 2, 1...

She's only nine months old! Eek!

iPod rulez, iTunes droolz

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 01:33:16 GMT

OK, so I'm really happy with the iPod, finally one which can hold my 55G of MP3s. Add on a bluetooth adapter and a pair of mobile-phone-compatible stereo bluetooth headphones and I am the happy bunny on the El. Also the annoying bunny who taps his foot to music, nods at podcasts, talks to angels, etc.

That out of the way, on with the bitching.

So, I wonder who is the market for an 80G iPod? Maybe people with large music collections? Maybe people who keep their music on a network file store, and access it from a laptop over a wireless network? Er, no. Apparently the market is people with almost no music, who store it on their local drive. Presumably the 80G is for copies of The Incredibles and Lost.

If you try loading MP3 files from a network drive onto an iPod, then iTunes suffers intermittent freezes, and is generally unresponsive (about 10-20 seconds to respond to each mouse click) and needs killed off every so often (which results in a sad iPod in need of reboot-fu). My guess is that iTunes is a single-threaded app which uses synchronous I/O for disk access, and just assumes that disk is fast. Grr, did they miss the "network is the computer" memo?

That wasn't the deal-killer though, I could live with the 3 weeks of hell that was getting the music onto the iPod. At least it's just a one-off cost. Ho ho.

Deal killer one: if a file is missing (e.g. because of transient network outage) then iTunes flags the file as missing and moves on. OK, seems reasonable. But the flag is sticky, so even if the network comes back, the file is still flagged as missing. The only way to clear the flag is to do get-info on the file. And no, selecting multiple files and doing get-info doesn't count, you need to do each file individually. And no no, rescanning the music directory doesn't work either. So if you have, for example, over 1,000 files flagged, you get to type Control-I/Return/Down-arrow a lot.

Deal killer two: gapless playback. This is a common gripe on the iTunes discussion forums, e.g. this thread. The problem is that to determine which tracks come from a gapless album (without the 2-second pause between tracks, e.g. pretty much any electronica) iTunes has to scan the MP3 file (grr) and it does this as a separate step rather than while downloading the track to the iPod (double grr). Over a wireless network this takes about 12 hours. If this was just a one-off cost, I could probably live with this, but if you add any music to your library, then it re-scans every damn MP3, argh argh argh.

The recommendation for gapless playback syndrome is to go back to iTunes 6, but (as I discovered after I'd deleted iTunes 7 and downgraded) my iPod requires iTunes 7. Did I mention argh argh argh?

The good news is Winamp, which is not nearly as slick as iTunes, does not have the deep iTunes catalogue, but actually just gets the job of synchronizing music done in a fairly sensible fashion. (At least so far, I only downloaded it today).

Summary: if you have a recent iPod and a decent-sized MP3 collection, and don't care about the iTunes store, avoid iTunes like the plague, and get yourself a copy of Winamp instead.

Run! Run!

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:19:09 GMT

J's report on the Field Museum:

Big dinosaur. Little arms. Fast. T. Rex. Sit down. (Hence no photos of J with said T. Rex.) Big head. Teeth.

Two elephants. Two totem poles.

Daddy carry J.

Mummies downstairs. 2, 3, 4, 9 mummies. Gold face. Mummy sit down sofa. (The last sentence makes me suspect there is a mummy/mummy confusion going on here.)

Jefferies Tube

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:25:26 GMT

L's impersonation of the Bond pre-credits sequence.

Snow

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:06:15 GMT

The view from our house. Brr.