Today I am mostly playing with the BBC iPlayer, Flickr and YouTube on the free Boxee media centre software on my netbook and listening to Gaggle… and yes, thank you very much to the person who said I should stick to Pixie Lott. You know who you are…
Archive for the 'music' Category
Channel 4 used to show stuff like this - Robert Ashley’s ‘opera for televsion’ called Perfect Lives. In 1983 this blew me away. I watched every minute. I think I might have to get the DVD - even on YouTube it looks like the remastering has worked well.
Mind you, they also had Countdown. And now, ironically, New Countdown has become a regular fixture on the office TV.
(behold my - working! - boot-up options, using the old-skool classic GRUB bootloader)
I’ve given up trying to get the audio to work on OS X on my IdeaPad’s msiWindOSX install. Could not get Audieee to work. A 10.5.5 update trashed the OS. I re-installed msiWindOSX and the fricking Terminal app wouldn’t run! I think a retail copy of Snow Leopard might be the way to go.
A colleague and I last night both reminisced on how much time we had spent getting out Bondi Blue iMacs to sync with out Palm Pilots by infra red. We reckoned about 2 weeks’ work. Some things are just not worth the effort. Besides, the current versions of Spotify and WINE play nice, so I can use my free Spotify account in Ubuntu!
Anyway, here’s a list of what I’ve tested and does work in msiWindOSX on a Lenovo S10-2:
- Screen, including brightness function keys.
- Wifi - with a little patch
- iTunes to manage my Mac-formatted iPod - but there’s no audio though, and I had to download new versions of QuickTime and iTunes to work with my iPod Nano
- Adobe Illustrator CS
- Webcam in iChat - but not in PhotoBooth
- The SD card reader slot works a treat - OS X can natively handle Nikon RAW NEF files, so OS X could be a useful tool for photography.
- FlickrUploadr
- Trackpad - but no gestures or 2-finger strolling
- Networking with other Macs over wifi (ethernet is not supposed to work but I’ve not tested it)
- USB devices such as memory sticks and Microsoft optical mouse
- TillyPaint!
Not yet tested:
- Bluetooth
- Ethernet (not expecting this to work)
- External VGA monitor
It’s ‘Own Clothes Day’ at my children’s schools today, to raise money for Haiti.
At breakfast I explained to my daughter, 4, what the money was for. She said ‘we know a song about an earthquake.’
I’d seen a Met Office primary school weather song sheet (’I hear thunder’ to the tune of ‘Frere Jacques’ and so on) so I was wondering if maybe the British Geological Survey had something similar.
On closer questioning it turned out she was referring to ‘Earthquake’ by Little Boots, which I must admit to listening to in the car Rather Loudly most mornings (when I’m not listening to Yesterday in Parliament on Radio 4 Long Wave, of course). It’s a guilty pleasure.
So I imagine that song will be off the radio playlists for a while…
This made me laugh out loud. So lovely to have mornings back again on 6Music… sigh. And I had that Holly Johnson in my studio a few weeks ago. I was sitting there playing out most of ‘Two Tribes’ on 5Live thinking - hang on, this is a speech network, we shouldn’t be doing this - with a big grin on my face.
Sesame Street is 40 years old, and I did wonder this morning why my children can’t see it. Could this PBS show that aims to reach out to so many people, not be on free-to-air TV in the UK?
But it’s not on Sky. It’s not on Nickelodian. It’s not on TV at all in mainland Britain. I’m stunned.
I love Sesame Street for its humour, its colour… and the fact that it taught me to read before I went to school. And count to 10 in Spanish.
Gowing up in North Somerset was good for something: apparently HTV showed it before anyone else.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8340141.stm
…you’ll love these.
What you need is
One. What face?
Two: face new
Three. Face mag for arse
Four. Three rules of audience
Five. Mug of Geoff Travis, framed
Six. The book Theft is Vision by the brothers Copeland.
The Fall, What You Need
I just watched the BBC4 doc on Rough Trade and am now watching the compilation of Rough Trade acts from BBC shows like Whistle Test, Top of the Pops etc.
Someone said in a TV review that the story of Geoff Travis and Rough Trade couldn’t fill a movie in the way that Tony Wilson and Factory Records did, and this is true, but it makes a fantastic companion piece to 24 Hour Party People. Both Factory and Rough Trade were idealistic, they tried to put the artists and the music first. Both went bust. Rough Trade’s story isn’t as romantic as Factory’s (how could it be?) but it’s a peculiarly London companion to Factory’s Mancunian rise and fall.
Forget Scritti Politti. Forget the Woodentops. Even forget The Smiths - why do I not have any Young Marble Giants records?! Why have I never even HEARD of Weekend, the band they begot, nor indeed Delta 5? And Mazzy Star?! I cannot bear to watch Mazzy Star, they are hurting my eyes at the same time as bathing my ears in languid vocals and slide guitar. Oh jeeeezus where have I been all this time?
Who knew that James’ ‘Sit Down’ was a Rough Trade single? James got screwed around my major labels who wanted them but didn’t know what to do with them. Tony Wilson once said that Tim Booth’s vocals were like sea shanties and my lord it sounds bonkers, but he was right.
Then there was Sandie Shaw’s version of ‘Hand in Glove’. I had totally, utterly, completely forgotten about that. It was a wonderful thing to behold, the Top of the Pops performance. At first so stilted, so awkward, then by the end even Andy Rourke is grinning at Sandie like a schoolboy. And now I am grinning like a schoolboy too. Right up to the point where Antony and the Johnsons make tears roll down my face.
Thank you Stefanie for sending me this ’sweet little film’…
Someone at work today told me that I am looking more and more like Guy Garvey out of Elbow.
Now that’s fine and dandy but it occurs to me as a bit odd as I’ve been listening to an awful lot of Elbow lately, so maybe the more you listen to a singer the more you come to resemble them. I think I should try listening to a lot of P J Harvey or Karen Carpenter and see what effect that has.
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