Milk’s Site

Just when you think you can’t get any more stupid than this;

“SANTA FE, New Mexico (AP) — Three CD players hidden under a cathedral’s pews blared sexually explicit language in the middle of an Ash Wednesday Mass, leading a bomb squad to detonate two of the devices.” link

there’s this, in the UK no less;

“Police have yet to establish how a tape dispenser which caused a security alert in Ballymena came to be left on a bollard outside a PSNI station. [...] The Army carried out a controlled explosion on the object which was declared safe.” link

Loving the BBC’s stock image selection for the article.

“First launched in June 2006, Net-Lab is a collaborative project run by members of InspireBox Media and the Wrong Music Corporation. Net-lab is an independent resource, free of commercial pressure. The site operates primarily from Brighton and Devon, UK. Net-Lab’s objective is to release a prolific collection of innovative media including music (primarily electronic), text, video and animation from around the world, in a freely distributable and re-distributable manner.

The site currently features work by an array of artists that you will recognise as already having excellent quality releases on labels including Wrong Music, Adadaat, Sublight, and Planet Mu. In the short time it has been publicly available for viewing, Net-Lab has distributed a collection of material including releases from Shitmat, Ebola, Chris Moss Acid and DJ Jo Quaid 5, plus compilations featuring The Gross Consumer, Twocsinak and more.”

I’ve listening through the stuff available, most enjoying the “Ital Tek – Terminator 2″ release and “The Teknoist – The Teknoist knows best smid smummer smash up (Mix)”.

net lab site
discogs profile

At work we have a booking system for the A/V equipment pool we maintain. One of the options one can select for items available is ‘LCD Display’. For months myself and the other two guys assumed this refered to an LCD monitor, although we didn’t actually stock any of these. It turned out that it actually refered to a type of unit with an LCD screen one attaches to a PC and then mounts on top of an overhead projector that was basically the predecessor to a data projector. A while back we had a clearout of some older stock and I saved a couple of these (Polaroid Polaview 1800s) from the skip (plus a shit load of large glass lenses from OHP units which I’m sure I’ll find a use for at some point). Having finally gotten around to testing them this evening, it appears both units are gubbed, so at least that’s less mass to take through to Edinburgh (they only ran on 640*480 anyway, but it would have been cool..), although the cases (pics in the link above) are rather neat and could be put to use for some function (I’m sure at some point…).

Does anyone have recommendations for glitchy house/tech-house and/or microhouse? I’m interested in exploring this area of stuff properly after hearing some right choons on Mixmag cover CDs in recent months (like stuff on DJ Touche (love that P Diddy track) and Erol Alkan’s). I’ve fallen in love with the track ‘Deck The House’ by Akufen and have also found this awesome glitchy electro breaks mix through themixingbowl.org. Anyone have any thoughts on similar stuff to check out?

P.S. If you like glitch, why not join ? It’s needing more peeps.

“By comparing modern man with our ancestors of 37,000 years ago, the Chicago team discovered big changes in two genes linked to brain size. One of the new variants emerged only 5,800 years ago yet is present in 30% of today’s humans, they believe.” link

“Thousands of volunteers have been out on the streets trying to persuade people to wait in line in order to present a better image to visitors. The campaign was launched under the slogan: ‘It’s civilised to queue, it’s glorious to be polite.’ … Officials in Beijing also want to tackle other social ills including spitting and dropping litter.” link

“With Vista just out the door, Microsoft Corp. is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product’s core components. .. ‘We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is.’” link

“A plastic shunt that can temporarily rejoin the severed blood vessels of soldiers wounded on the battlefield won federal approval Friday, following an expedited review. Citing what it called a critical need for the shunt, the Food and Drug Administration took less than a week to review and clear for marketing the Temporary Limb Salvage Shunt.” link

“Children as young as four are being taught philosophy in nursery, BBC Scotland has learned. … New research from Dundee University suggests learning philosophy raises children’s IQ by up to 6.5 points and improves their emotional intelligence. … He said: ‘The critical thing about it is that it allows the youngster to move to a level where informed choice can be made.’” link

“Interval recognition is also a useful skill for musicians: in order to determine the notes in a melody, a musician must have some ability to recognize intervals. Some music teachers teach their students relative pitch by having them associate each possible interval with the first two notes of a popular song. Here are some examples for each interval, measured in half-steps (aka semi-tones) from zero (unison) to 12 (one complete octave), along with the name of each interval:” link

What do you believe [just now]?

Who here uses a podcatcher? In fact, who here uses an RSS/ATOM feed reader? Anyway. If you don’t know what podcasting is, then, basically put, it’s when someone creates and uploads a series of audio files and also maintains a web feed (that part is usually handled automatically by the podcast backend software/service) that points to where these files are available online. People can usually either download or listen to the files using their browser (plug-in or flash) by visiting the site, but the main thing that makes podcasting ‘podcasting’ is the ability to use an application or web service to subscribe to the web feed that will then give the option to automatically notify of and download any newly published audio files.

So, what’s kind of stuff is available for people to subscribe to? Anything you can fit in an audio file really. There are many directory sites online to browse through for interesting stuff. Here’s a list of my current podcast subscriptions;

• Music
  • Connexion Bizarre (feed)
  • Dance Department (feed)
  • Drum&BassArena Podcast (feed)
  • Farmyard Radio (feed)
  • Mashup of the Week Podcast (feed)
  • re:automation podcast (feed)
  • ReGen Magazine (Industrial, EBM, Goth, Synthpop, Electronic) (feed)
  • RobotMix – Electro, Techno, Bleep Mix (feed)
• Other
  • The Adam & Joe Xfm Podcast (feed)
• Tech
  • Security Now! (feed)
  • this WEEK in TECH – MP3 Edition (feed)

No, I don’t listen to them all regularly, but I’ll download a one or two shows of a particular feed if I’m in the mood. Dance Department features a 30 min mix each week from the likes of (*picks out interesting names in backwards order from the feed*) Richie Hawton, Gabriel Ananda, Tiesto, Sven Vath, Miss Kittin, Ricardo Villalobos, Tocadisco, Trentemoller and many more, a section from the head of Beatport featuring the weeks most downloaded track from their service, and more house/techno goodness. The Drum&BassArena Podcast features mixes from Hype and other such DnB scene DJs, and I’ve also been enjoying ’s RobotMix and ’s re:automation shows. (Oi, , where’s the feed for Distorted Circuitry? :p)

What podcatcher software do I use? After much testing, I decided on Ziepod. It looks like this. I would have loved to have gone with an open source solution, but I tried them all and they sucked even more. Sure, Ziepod has an annoying unchangeable window skin, but it separates information regarding feed entries in a mail client stylee three-pane window and distinguishes between to download, downloaded and played tracks clearly. I’m not even going to start on about iTunes, although it’s the most well known and used app when it comes to podcasting. Winamp has an in-built system, but doesn’t seem to want to display feeds properly and doesn’t import or export OPML files (subscribed feeds in XML format). Juice lists all available and downloaded in one long window in order of publication date and seems to doesn’t seem to cache each feeds RSS entry, wasting time having to download it each time a new profile is selected. jpodder – Java, was slow, and annoying GUI, and slow. doppler didn’t quite get it’s window layout quite right. And etc. Turns out the news feed client Newzie which Ziepod is based upon is a rather nifty app in it’s own right and has an intuitive system for displaying feeds, although it uses the Internet Explorer engine to render HTML in-client and won’t let you set it to open web links in Firefox. Thoughts anyone? What do those who bother use?

P.S. Distorted Circuitry now has an RSS feed!