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May 25, 2005
baton
I was passed the musical baton by Dan... as with others, it goes against my normal web etiquette, but I do like writing about music. The delay has been due to the fact that my main music computer is under plastic sheeting at the moment, and also I hoped to include something more substantive than just answers to these questions. I realised that this would probably mean that it would just never happen, so I've just jumped in and done it. Apologies for vacuousness.
Like Dan, my audioscrobbler page is more of a representation, but since getting an iPod shuffle, I've pretty much moved to using it for all my music. Unfortunately, audioscrobbler won't play nice with the shuffle, due to audioscrobbler's overly purist approach to data collection. It's my music profile, and I should be able to add anything I damn well like.
Shuffles are great for mood - I really want about 10 shuffles, filled with different mood music. I would quite probably never buy a cd again.
Total volume of music on my computer
At a rough guess, 50-60Gb. I haven't completely centralised it, so it's spread on 3 computers and 2 music devices. I still have far more in hydrocarbon form that is unripped.
The last CD I bought
I find this question a disjoint from the previous; due to the lack of availability of CDs to my taste in Finland, I have mainly been buying electronically - about half and half iTunes Music Store and bleep. I went into all the megastores in the UK last week, and left with nothing; a rare occurrence. My last real CDs were probably bought at Amoeba in Hollywood, a large fistful (10 or so).
So, my last purchase was from bleep:
Mrs Cruff by Mr Scruff - because I had some of the 12"s, and Chicken In A Box remains a monster tune.
The album, Blues du Jour, and the single Open Field by Maher Shahal Hash Baz - a really nice gentle Japanese wood and euphonium band. I have a hole in my music collection of gentle small music, which I'm trying to fill (even my classical choices - such as Koyaanisquatsi - get rather loud and fast towards the end). Nothing to fall to sleep on a plane to. The new M Ward album is good as well.
I also downloaded all the free RipNBurn tracks from bleep. Get them, there are some corkers by Mugison (#1 album in Iceland for 2 months!), Jamie Lidell (imagine the Rolling Stones blindfolded colliding with several drumkits after a mid-90s rave), the Go! Team, Vitalic (theoretically not available to download in Finland, bah), Luke Vibert, Quasimoto, Busdriver, Four Tet.... they are all really good.
Song playing right now
I tend to listen to music when moving, or cooking, or washing up. Nothing at the moment. Well, as I was adding all the links, I've got Artists Only by Talking Heads on.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me
I had the greatest hits of Wire, The Fall and Talking Heads on my shuffle for a couple of months, so I know these inside out.
Big New Prinz by The Fall
This could have easily been many other Fall tracks - Wrong Place Right Time, Hey! Luciani, Hit the North, Sons of Temperance, Dr Buck's Letter - but this is the one that has stayed on my shuffle even with large music changes. I think it's due to Mark E Smith's exclamation that 'thhheeeeeeessssss iiissssssss nnnuuuutttttsssssss-aaahhh'. I love songs playing with words, rhythm, utterance and repetition, and this also has one of the cleverest basslines I know.
Dot Dash by Wire
Again, it's a wordplay song, and yet again, I could have picked many others - notably Three Girl Rhumba, or Practice Makes Perfect.
No Compassion by Talking Heads
Talking Heads are the masters of words, and I can't even pick just a few tracks that stand out. I love this for the musical repetition and time changes, even stopping for a bit in the middle.
Give Out But Don't Give Up by Primal Scream
Lots of people hate the album, but this one track is great - consider it a p-funk track and it makes a lot of sense. It is long, but you need the first 6 minutes to get ready for a spine-tingling moment involving Hammond organ. Marvellous.
Koyaanisquatsi by Philip Glass
The film really is amazing, but so is the soundtrack on its own. I think this is probably the best example of Glass' cyclical work that builds and builds to the climactic piece, The Grid.
Changed my mind. A track that I probably won't be listening to much in 6 months, but on constant rotation at the moment -
Hayling by FC Kahuna - both the incredible haunting original, and the loud Super Furry Animals remix. Fantastic.
Five people to whom I'm passing the baton
My natural instinct is to say no-one, as whilst I don't mind being imposed on, I won't be imposing. I also find it a bit self-referential as most blog backslaps. So, I'll democratise it a bit - everyone has to respond. If you have somewhere online where you write, it's your turn!
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May 09, 2005
sensor
A slight work intrusion - Nokia has just launched Sensor, an application that use Bluetooth to indicate and start proximity interactions - i.e. people within 10-30m of you. You create a folio - like a little web page - that others in your physical location can see.
I've not been involved with this project, but I've been watching it bloom since I got here, and I'm now really really glad that it's launched. It's a commercial release of a lot of things I think are important - small groups, local interactions and situatedness. It's also got some really nice iconography, graphic design and interaction design. Congratulations to everyone involved.
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May 08, 2005
prototyping ambient displays on Tiger
Tiger is proving an effective prototyping environment for ambient displays. Andrew has noted the use of Dashboard, which I'm going to play with next) but I've been using Quartz Composer.
It has some nice features that make it easy - reads RSS feeds for data input, works full screen, and can be used as a screensaver. An iMac or old iBook sitting in the corner can therefore easily be used as an ambient display.
The main disadvantage is that it's 2D (the display at least), with a fixed angle of viewing. It can, however, make sound, change colour, and distract you when it needs to. They feature one quality which the most glanceable ambient displays use - they pump photons (or not, when appropriate - the iMac features a light sensor that dims its breathing sleep LED when in the dark).
There were three things I wanted to prototype - copies of Ambient Devices' Orb and Dashboard, and a version of the networked emoticon device (mixed with a hint of glancing). I'm halfway through the orb and the emoticon, but I've got a version of the dashboard working.
At the moment, it just reads slightly modified RSS feeds from my weather service. RSS truly is the universal data pipe for the Internet.
Quartz Composer is pretty easy - it's a visual programming environment designed for graphics and video. You can use Javascript in it, and apparently it's very good, but for this I've just wired together modules provided.
the programming flow for one of the gauges
My only problem is rendering simple primitive objects - like a straight line or a sphere. Maybe I'm missing something, but the main generators seem to be for complex objects, like plasma, 3d line grids, and, errr, teapots. The needles on the graphs are actually made out of a hundred lines or so, which is why it's pretty heavy on the processing. If anyone knows how to draw a simple 2d line, let me know.
The Quartz Composer file is here if anyone wants to play or hack or use it as a screensaver (Tiger users only). Note the RSS feeds are slightly modified URLs from standard, but it shouldn't be too hard to work out if you want to change cities.
Note the math isn't proper - I'm not doing any trigonometry. The great thing with this is that we can test to see if linear, log or any other movements are noticed and needed.
Update: just remembered that Quartz Composer can take video as an input - so you can use an iSight to project your displays in space!
Now we can all do virtual reality infographics a la Peter Snow.
