the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Finally!! The blog is back!! It’s been down for almost two months, with the server that it’s hosted on being knackered, but it’s back now, and I’ve got lots to catch up on.
If you want to read the stuff that I’ve been blogging about over the last couple of months, you can head over to my MySpace blog and have a read.
LOADS to catch up on here, but suffice to say, I’m in Ohio at the moment, about to do a load of American dates – see the gigs page for more on that!
It’s great to be back…
Found via a link on Jonny Baker’s blog – The Guardian’s top 100 most useful websites – not many surprises there (Google, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube all get a mention) but a couple of useful looking things I’d not seen before. Definitely one for all you cuddly geeks out there.
x
Comments are down on this ‘ere blog at the moment. Problems caused by the scumbags who keep trying to spam it (the spam gets filtered, but it doesn’t stop them trying 100s of times a minute!)
So if you want to comment/discuss stuff on here, you’ll have to do it over in The forum – the new signup thing there is that you need to put the word ‘MODULUS’ in the space for the VIP code on the signup page. Another measure to stop spammers from signing up automatically…
see you over there…
Greenpeace are taking on Apple over their use of harmful chemicals in the manufacturing process. Click the link to head to the site and email Apple about it.
Apple have pulled off one of the most amazing marketing coups of our time – whilst being a multi-billion dollar company with no independently monitored ethical policy at all, they’ve managed to become the digital accessory company of choice for creatives and lefties and hippies and everyone, just by being perceived as less evil than Microsoft.
So, if they want to keep that image, we need to hold them to the standards they imply, but don’t enforce. Get to it!
I HATE it when corporations do shit like this – a while ago, a friend turned me on to a great application called ‘Cover Flow’ – it basically catalogued all the albums in your iTunes folder and automatically downloaded the cover art for them so you can flick through it like a stack of records. A really great app. The interface was good, and the fact that it ignored single tracks, and just stuck with albums was great. It kept the whole thing neat.
Naturally, Apple saw it and wanted a piece of the action, and have built it into the new version of iTunes. But they’ve messed it up! It catalogues everything, uses the cover images embedded in the MP3s, is much harder to update, doesn’t jiggle around in the groovy way that cover flow did, and isn’t full screen, cos it’s built into itunes. In short, it’s a crap version of the freeware one that was put out before.
Thank God I’ve still got the original app, and I’m holding onto it. I might see if there’s way of uploading it somewhere for anyone if any of you want it… it’s for mac only though…
[UPDATE] GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR – the old Coverflow doesn’t integrate with the new iTunes!!!! How shit is that? So I’m going to have to ‘make the best of it’ with the new shit cover flow. not fair at all.
Should’ve blogged this ages ago, but was using it a lot at Greenbelt and introduced quite a few people to it, so here it is –
if you need to either a) extend your battery life or b) see the screen in a really sunny place, you can invert the colour of the screen (like a negative of a photo) by holding down the control, alt and apple keys and pressing number 8. If the screen is predominantly white space, it saves lots on the battery, and you can then turn down the brightness of the screen (with the two buttons in the top left of the keyboard) and save lots of battery life.
I was shown this in LA in January by Janek, and used it a lot when trying to jack wifi from outside cafes in Hollywood. :o)
So, I switched comments back on yesterday, and have had over 300 bits of spam since then!
For fuck’s sake, is there no way of blocking this stuff from even getting here? it all gets filtered into a junk-mail folder, but then so do all the normal comments, so I have to go through them all looking for non-spam. And before any geeks ask, no they aren’t from the same IP address, so I can’t just block it, sadly.
…and I thought pizza leaflets were a pain in the arse.
Ahhh, myspace is back. That was scary for a moment…
Anyway, just in case you’ve not been there yet, here are the three MySpace pages I’ve got –
MeSpace
The New Standard
Recycle Collective
head over there, hear some tunes, and add us as friends if you’re on MySpace yourself.
My myspace page has vanished! As has the Recycle Collective one… I’m pretty sure it’s a technical problem with the site, not that I’ve actually been erased, as there are loads of people who’ve lost there’s including The Lovely Rev. G, Unknown Public and Pete Levin – too random a selection of lovelies for it to mean anything in terms of a deletion policy.
So I’m now waiting for it to reappear… come on!
this is a quick test to see if the ‘quick post’ option for this blog works… one click blogging! As if I don’t blog enough already…
x
[edit] This is also my 1000th post on this blog!!!! What a decidedly disappointing way to celebrate such an auspicious blogging landmark. Ah well, you can throw your own street parties, I’ve got work to do…[/edit]