Milk’s Site

“The veteran Scrobblers [Last.fm users] amongst you will probably remember our ‘moderation system’ – this was a user-voting system that let you propose and merge artists, ultimately fixing misspelled artists by creating aliases to the correct version. We are planning to bring this back in a big way, addressing not only artists, but albums and tracks too. … Phase 1 is now underway with the first public ‘beta’ release of our new fingerprinting technology. This will mature into a nice sexy (free) API that lets you grab clean metadata based on an audio fingerprint.” On using a system other than Musicbrainz; “The jist will be that although we will use a different fingerprint system, it will still be possible to use it to resolve MBIDs, and once we’ve cleaned up our metadata a bit, we will endeavour to match our catalogue with Musicbrainz. Matching our catalogue to MB atm is hard, because it is so messy.” plus “Just because the guys at MusicIP gave MusicBrainz a free license doesn’t mean that Last.fm (as a paying MB licensee) is obliged to use them too (for more money).” link

“IDG in Sweden is reporting the contents of a leaked Microsoft memo sent to Microsoft partners there, telling them to join the Swedish Institute of Standards and vote yes on OOXML [the Microsoft alternative to ODF]. As you know, 20+ newly registered Microsoft partner companies did so, thus switching the expected No vote to Yes at the last minute. It says Microsoft’s representative Klas Hammar acknowledges the memo was sent, but says it should not have been. …the IBM representative left prior to the vote in protest. An SIS representative defends the process, saying it’s tactical, not against the rules. He acknowledges that the rules might need to be changed.” link

“iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people’s to guess what you’ll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.” link

Nokia’s iPhone — no, seriously – Looks, um, slightly narrower.
Possibility of PlayStation Phone – Like the N-Gage, but not.
Soy sauce for ice cream – Sounds nummy-ish.

Jeremy Paxman’s @ Edinburgh International Television Festival: The James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture; “the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can’t even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin’s Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever.”

“NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends. These NO events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafes, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants, whose identities remain unknown to one another, agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another ‘Friend’ is present in the space. NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 – 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.”

Webcam Snowstorm – “This experiment simulates a snowfall with 400 snowflakes on screen, each with random size, rotation, speed and blur (using BlurFilter). Each of them is independently affected by wind (as partially controlled by your cursor’s x position). That Flash can run it all fluidly is impressive in itself, but of course there’s more. It’s also monitoring the webcam input, detecting edges, and making the snowflakes settle gently on any horizontal surface they encounter – pretty cool.”

Ultrastar – “PC conversion of famous karaoke game – Singstar. It allows a computer to evaluate how good you are when you sing by analyzing your voice pitch. Sing your favourite songs and see how you improve.”

For you beer fans out there; beer machine makes beer (and for you wino’s; Cork’d).

History of social network sites (a work-in-progress)

Halo Arms Race: Part 1, Halo Arms Race: Part 2

Getting to the bottom of the gPhone rumors

Raving Rabbids 2 Belch Olympics video

Prosthetics for animals

“TubeStop is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube videos. This means that you can open multiple YouTube videos in tabs in the background without them all starting to play at once. TubeStop also disables the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com sites (MySpace, for example).”

“The TubeStop Firefox extension that I wrote in order to stop YouTube videos from auto-playing also has the serendipitous side-effect of removing ads from YouTube videos. Since YouTube is only serving ads through the player on their main site, and not on the embeddable/syndicated player, and TubeStop works by replacing YouTube’s native player with the embeddable version, you won’t see any ads when you’re using TubeStop.” link

Just spotted this via backstage.bbc.co.uk;

“Edinburgh TV Un-Festival 2007: This year the MGEITF (Media Guardian International TV Festival) has spawned its own fringe event, the TV Un-Festival. This day-long event which takes place on Saturday 25 August will centre around the clash of the well established TV world and the constantly accelerating Internet world using the unusual un-conference format, where the cost of entry is participation.

“The highlights from the TV Un-Festival will be presented at this special event, giving everyone a chance to speculate on the future of TV, online entertainment and cross platform narratives. This year the TV Un-Festivial hosted by Backstage.bbc.co.uk and guided along by the fabulous Suw Charman, aims to explorer the clash with in a series of free formed sessions similar to BarCamp known as unconference style. Everyone will be able to participate by using one of the free 30 minute slots which will be available.

“We’re getting together a real solid line up of people including people from Joost, Microsoft, BT, BBC, Google, etc. But we’re also inviting some of the people from the darker areas of online TV like the guys behind some of the cleverest p2p sites online today. We’re also inviting you – the passionate geek, media/net/culture professional.

“The collision of technologies means a collision of cultures – expect to meet those like you, and nothing like you. Media for sit back, lean forward or run around? This is the place to discuss ideas, share technologies, start larger debates, forge alliances and futures.

“There are many questions that arise from the collision of TV, Internet, Mobile, and the wide variety of media, new, old, future. This is the place to discuss these questions, explore what is happening today at the fringes, and to bring it together, celebrate differences and move forward in a headlong rush.”

The BBC Backstage blog notes that is to be giving a talk on Machinima, and subjects such as alternate reality games and remixable films are also on the agenda. I’ve registered my interest in attending and thought others might appreciate the heads up.

Leila and I have recently been working our way through the House of Cards trilogy (thankings to ) which I haven’t seen previously and am enjoying immensely so far (if anyone has any recommendations for politically themed TV shows, please comment. We worked through all of Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister a couple of months ago, which was fantastic, and Armando Iannucci’s The Thick Of It seems to be magically appearing on my PC as I type..). Just The Final Cut to go now. But there is the matter of it’s dammed soundtrack, composed by one Jim Parker (a list of the various TV shows he has produced soundtracks for on there). It’s rather good. I would link to either an audio or video clip for your listening pleasure, but I can’t for the life of me find it anywhere online. There doesn’t even appear to be a soundtrack CD available. Can anyone confirm that this is definitely the case? For that would be bad. My searching did however bring up his theme to Ground Force plus a piece titled Radio City which has some lovely timing.

Went to The Forest yesterday evening after short notice for an electronic music event featuring Edinburgh Uni students. Was rather fun. Announced near the end was this (which I shall most likely be at);

Nothing To See Here.
7pm Thursday 9th August.
The Old Library, University of Edinburgh Geography building, Drummond St.
100 metres along from the Brass Monkey on the opposite side of the road.

An evening of Electroacoustic music including new works from Jules Rawlinson and Sean Williams and a new version of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix” for fridges.

£5/£3 voluntary fee!

Went to The Forest yesterday evening after short notice for an electronic music event featuring Edinburgh Uni students. Was rather fun. Announced near the end was this (which I shall most likely be at);

Nothing To See Here.
7pm Thursday 9th August.
The Old Library, University of Edinburgh Geography building, Drummond St.
100 metres along from the Brass Monkey on the opposite side of the road.

An evening of Electroacoustic music including new works from Jules Rawlinson and Sean Williams and a new version of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix” for fridges.

Â?5/Â?3 voluntary fee!