Author Archives: Alan

I just really enjoyed a Justin Bieber song!

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Alan

Justin Bieber: Irritating pop-goblin rendered lovely by technology...

I hadn’t heard of who Justin Bieber was until some Twitbook type campaign tried to get him to play some gig somewhere or other.

Even when I found out his identity I wasn’t in a rush to hear one of his songs particularly, so filed him in the back of my mind in the place where other such nonentities are placed to be ignored when they may encroach upon my daily doings.

Until today.

Thanks to my friend Alex’s awesome discovery, there appears to be a way to render this flaccid excuse for music into something beautiful.  By stretching out the song ‘U Smile’ by 800%, suddenly the squeaking histrionics is transformed into a beautiful ambient soundscape lasting over 35 minutes.

If you like a bit of ambient music I think you’ll really enjoy it.  I’ve just downloaded it in mp3 form, I reckon it could make awesome ‘go to sleep’ music – and you can check it out by utilising the handy music player widget thing just below this paragraph.

Tantalisingly on the artists’ SoundCloud page are instructions on how the slowed-down version of the Bieber song was achieved.  Instructions that I have followed, and am eager to share.  Whilst I’m pleased to have heard Justin Bieber 800% more slow than his producers intended, I still have no desire to listen to him at full speed.

So what if I were to slow down a song I actually knew really well and liked?

Well that’s precisely what I’ve done – rather than go for squeaky safe pop music (which admittedly not many examples of which fall into the two above categories!), I decided to go for something that you would never ever consider as anything approximating ambient.

Ladies and gentleman, I invite you to take an ambient journey into the world of Motorhead, and their seminal hit ‘Ace of Spades‘ slowed down by the same 800% as the Bieber experiment linked above*.  I think I’d go as far as to say it’s been an interesting experiment!

But d’you know what’s depressing, and I never thought I’d say this, I think I prefer Justin Bieber to Motorhead!  It was also quite impressive that Cat identified the artist upon first listen despite not knowing what I was up to… definitely more foreboding and malignant sounding that lil’ Justin though.

Having gotten over the technical wibblery (ie. me being a bit of a fucktard) I continued the theme, and this result I’m really pleased with – so below is the Levellers (a fairly obscure album track) ‘Maid of the River’ – one of my favourite ever songs, rendered much slower, and it’s nearly as beautiful as the original, and pisses on Bieber.  Oh yes.  Fuck you, Justin!

Have a listen to the following wonderful epic, and then go and get yourself some Levellers albums, because they’re awesome at full speed too!

*Footnote – it would have taken considerably less time if I’d paid attention to the instructions rather than leap in and create a 36 hour rendering of Ace of Spades by using the wrong ratio measure, the file clocking in at over 1GB!

Categories: Blog, Levellers | 2 Comments

The C word..

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Alan

Not that c word.  The other one, the worse one.  Cancer.

I’ve been very lucky that – touch wood – it’s not impacted my nearest and dearest to a great extent.  It was with a massive degree of inspiration I read the blog of one of my friends’ fathers though who hasn’t been so lucky. 

Whilst I can’t empathise quite with this illness specifically, with recent heart-related scares in our family of late I’m reasonably well versed in coming to terms with the fact that we are all very much mortal beings.  It’s a scary realisation, none of us are here forever – we know that – but it’s not nice to have unexpected reminders of that.

I would urge you to have a read – I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting David, my mate’s dad – but am amazingly inspired by his reaction to the shitty hand that fate seems to have dealt him.  Just as we can be prone to over-reacting to relatively trivial events, I am full of admiration for how he is the exact opposite – remaining positive and upbeat in the face of perhaps the least trivial news you’re ever likely to get.

As well as this, he has taken positive action to raise thousands of pounds to promote both awareness and early diagnosis of cancer, as well as cancer research.  It’s truly staggering and incredibly humbling – and really helps to bring things into perspective when you get a little bogged down in day-to-day mundanities that shouldn’t really worry you as much as they do.

If you feel as moved as I have been then there’s a link to donate to ‘Windsurfing for Cancer Research’.  I was tempted to say a legacy to be proud of, but in his own words:  ‘Sod my life expectancy progress – I will be there.’  I really hope so.

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Little pig, little pig, let me in!

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Alan

I often wonder how my brain works, I think many people who encounter me do as well.  Yesterday a song called ‘Three Little Pigs’ by a fairly obscure band called Green Jelly popped into my head.  Why? I have no idea – this kind of thing happens to me often, indeed, a colleague said to me today “whenever random songs start running through my head it’s generally your fault.”

Combined with a labyrinthine ability to remember lyrics from things I’ve not heard in ages I can’t help but think I’ve somehow missed a trick with some part of my brain that hoovers up everyday trivialities instead of filing useful information in an easily retrievable fashion.  That said, a number of times in my daily doings I’ve stumbled upon techniques to harness this nature of the brain, but never mastered them.

This, for your delectation, is ‘Three Little Pigs’ by the formidible Green Jelly:

So yeah, whilst I can merrily recall artists, song names and lyrics from more than decade ago – that I suspect I’ve not heard since then – I quite merrily struggle to recall pieces of work I’ve been striving toward within a few weeks.  I suppose that’s some kind of insight into motivations, isn’t it?  Maybe.

In other news, meat-drying production has continued to be successful – although I’ve since discovered the bag sealer I was using perhaps wasn’t quite as airtight as I’d hoped so just had to consign an older batch to the bin disappointingly.  I have another load currently drying so it shan’t be long ’til I have meaty goodness available again.  Pissed off at the waste though, back to using takeaway boxes and refrigerating, methinks.

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Jailbreakage for iPhone 4

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Alan

I was quite excited by the jailbreak when it was announced, then it didn’t work.  Of course, I love my iPhone 4 just as it is, but the temptation to unleash whatever things Apple might not want unleashing is always tempting to me for some reason.

Sadly the demand for the website ‘jailbreakme.com’ meant that my initial attempts weren’t a success – however, thank to Pip I followed the steps below with first time success, so if you’re struggling – give the following steps a try:

  1. Close the tab in Safari of the jailbreak page
  2. Exit Safari
  3. Go to Settings -> Safari -> Accept Cookies
  4. change Accept Cookies to ALWAYS
  5. Go back one menu step and click on “Clear Cookies” and “Clear Cache”
  6. Go back into Safari and go to jailbreakme.modmyi.com

Ah, Cydia, how I’ve missed thee.  Rather sadly, my number one reason for jailbreaking is to have the five icon dock again!

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Apple case programme for iPhone 4..

Posted on July 25, 2010 by Alan

I was pleasantly surprised today, upon receiving an email from Apple with details of the free App they just released to handle ‘Case Gate’.  I was just expecting to see a few bumpers in there, which I didn’t really want – but naturally would’ve ordered anyway, since it was free.  Actually there’s a choice of eight, including a black bumper – although this is subject to change.

The bumper obviously only protects the sides of the device – and also renders it largely incompatible with docks and mounts, plus it looks a bit naff.  The other offerings seem to offer at least three-side covering, and after a bit of careful research (read: clicking the first very useful link I found upon Googling) I’ve opted for a Speck Pixelskin HD case.

A fairly sizeable drawback is the shipping estimate of 2-3 months – of course, I don’t really need the case, I’ve not had the ‘death grip’ problem and he addition of a Gelaskin to my phone should eliminate most of the risk of that anyway, but imagine if people are suffering from signal loss – 2-3 months to solve it?  that’s really not very clever for them!

“Yeah, sorry your phone doesn’t work properly, we’ll send you something to fix it in 3 months time.”  Hmm. Not good.  That said, I do think the zeal with which the media, non-iPhone owners and owners of old iPhone have jumped upon Jobs & co regarding this is laughable.  There have been a minuscule number of people complaining of issues compared to those of us who are still delighting in the awesomeness of iPhone 4.

Pretty much the same you’d find with any other new device launch.  Microsoft calling it ‘Apple’s Vista’ is overly harsh, then again, I’m writing this post on a laptop sporting Vista too… maybe I just have a soft-spot for maligned devices or operating systems?  Whilst I prefer Windows 7 which we have on our Desktop upstairs, Vista ain’t so bad once you disable all the memory-hogging pointlessness.

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Meaty goodness!

Posted on July 25, 2010 by Alan

Despite oft being surrounded by vegetarians, I’m very much a carnivore – and one of the obsessions we’ve been developing at work is a real penchant for dried meat products.  It started with Beef Jerky, and now we’re on to Biltong.  A process that originates from Europe but was made widespread in South Africa when the new colonisers needed to be able to preserve food whilst they developed herds for a sustainable food source.

My fledgling Biltong in it's dryer awaiting nature to take its' course!

Anyway, I digress.  It’s yummy – so naturally we started looking at how one would go about making it (as you do), and it’s surprisingly easy – the only tricky we have is our climate is a little strange.  Drying meat doesn’t necessarily need heat, but it does need airflow and also a dry (ie, not humid) atmosphere – so for something effective in our climate I used some instructions I found on the internet to make a very basic ‘biltong box’ in which to hang my meat (wahey!).

Whilst out and about picking up suitable parts for my new toy I also picked up a topside steak from Morrisons to be my first experiment.  My first job was to assemble the loosely planned design I had in my head from a shelving unit that was on sale in B&Q, some bits of wood I had from some doomed project or other, and some electrical bits to add a light bulb to the lower compartment.

It went surprisingly well, so I also had time to prepare the meat this evening and try a number of different marinades – I have eight pieces of meat now hanging in the garage, three with a kind of spiced/salted herby ‘rub’ on them, two with a sweet chilli marinade, two with Reggae Reggae Sauce covering them and finally one small piece with no marinade (beyond the salting and vinegar process recommended in the instructions) just to see what it tastes like unadorned.

Obviously being the first attempt it’s tricky to know when it will be ‘done’ so I think I’ll leave it towards the longer side of the 3-5 days it should take to dry.  It seems weird you can just make raw meat edible by leaving it to dry, but then I suppose technically it’s edible raw anyway.  With a bit of luck it will be suitably dry by Thursday evening so that I can take some in to work on Friday to test out on the my fellow Biltong fans at work!

For those of you who may have had their interest piqued but don’t want to go so far as to making your own Biltong over a period of days – you can apparently use an electric fan-assisted oven set to 40-70 °C (100-160 °F), with the door open a fraction to let out moist air – this can apparently dry the meat in approximately 4 hours.  Failing that, I found (via Jonathan – thanks Jonathan! – this awesome website which sells a variety of Biltong made from different meats, I might just have to place an order irrespective of how mine turns out!

Today I also found a stash of unidentified homebrew in a kitchen cupboard, so a meat and ‘wine and mead we’re not sure specifically what it is made of, or when it was made’ evening might be on the cards!  Amongst that lot was also an Elderflower wine kit so I might get around to making that too, whilst I’m in some kind of foodcraft kind of a mood.  Alcohol and meat – awesome.

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I wanna rock and roll all night!

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Alan

This is what we got up to at work a little over a week ago – it was fun, and as part of a day raising funds and awareness for the Boots Benevolent Fund, it was also for a great cause.

There’s some pics on my Flickr stream too, for your amusement.  It’s definitely amongst my favourite fancy dress shenanigans for a while, and I do think such things are generally enhanced by them taking place whilst you’re at work at being paid for it!

Woodpecker! What a refreshing change!

In other news we spotted a woodpecker in the garden today feasting on peanuts with the usual woodpigeons, doves, sparrows, starlings and finches.  Quite exciting really, he was pretty brave too – only flying off when we lurked a little too close to the window, hence the shit quality of the picture.

We’ve also turned our bedroom into, literally, a bedroom – we’ve acquired a massive bed courtesy of my folks who didn’t want it any more which is ace.  So Friday evening was spent assembling that, then popping to Rich’s to reassemble our old bed at his place – which means nothing goes to waste!

In technology news Apple have acknowledged there’s an issue with the new iPhone and as such will issue refunds on request, or give people a free case which should negate the issue.  I must say I’ve not had too many problems with mine, that said, I get a poor signal at home anyway on O2 – and holding the phone in the ‘death grip’ does seem to be slightly worse, but well, meh.

I’m no Apple fanboy really, but it seems to me that people and the media seem all the too keen to try to knock the hitherto whiter-than-white company – and Steve Jobs – off the perceived pedestal, and taking great delight in it – rather than actually reporting anything that’s a general problem.  That’s my take on it anyway.

Naturally I’ll still claim a free case, though!

Categories: Blog, Videos | 2 Comments

iPhone phwoar!

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Alan

Okay, despite the previous post I have (as anyone who has had any contact with me will undoubtedly be aware!) end up with an iPhone 4.  And I love it.  A lot.  Before you even use thing thing it just feels nice.  It apparently weighs the same as a 3GS but it feels more solid, with metal and glass rather than plastic it takes the things I really liked about the original iPhone and makes them better.

The press seem to have picked up on the mysterious ‘death grip’ which is something that I’ve not really experienced, although it’s true I have a poor O2 reception at home (considering getting a repeater to boost it – anyone got experience of these?), so more testing will perhaps bear that out some more, but I always had a low signal strength at home on my old iPhones too, so that’s nothing new with this one.

It’s a LOT faster than my poor old 3G, which is now sitting forlornly in an Envirophone bag waiting to be sent away for some cash, and I’m loving the new features – although as yet, because of it only being available on iPhone 4 and whilst on a WIFI connection, I’ve yet to have any ‘Facetime’ with anyone (unfortunately the port it uses is blocked on our work WIFI system).  So that’s something to look forward to, if nothing else because of the innuendo that naturally follows saying ‘Facetime’!!

iPhone OS4 is a big improvement – the pseudo-multitasking might not please the purists, but functionally it works really well, and the ability to but stuff into folders – which has been doable via jailbreaking for ages – is long overdue by Apple.  All in all, very happy – I’ll be happier when my new Gelaskin arrives so I can make the thing as hermetically sealed as possible to limit scratches!

It’s also encouraged me to revisit the AppStore a bit more, which I’d neglected somewhat of late – for those in a similar boat, check out FaceSwap which is really clever – to think how long I used to spend Photoshopping people’s heads onto things, it really is amazing..  I’m currently undecided over the jailbreaking question, I imagine as time goes on I’ll be lured back into it but currently don’t have too much of an urge to go unlegit.

In other exciting news, my brother Rich has proposed to Em and she accepted – this deed apparently took place during the final throes of the Flaming Lips performance at Glastonbury.  Of course, I now need to know the likely speed of events since Rich has also done me the tremendous honour of asking me to be his best man.  Gulp.  At least I can be confident that he won’t schedule anything to clash with the footy!

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iMoan..

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Alan

I’m quite excited about the iPhone 4.  Having had O2 act like the monopoly-holding arseholes that they were at the time of the 3GS launching, it just wasn’t financially viable to upgrade then.  I’m quite glad I held out now.

Except… it seems impossible, aside from paying for a sim-free phone from Apple direct (which costs a LOT) to actually secure yourself the coveted device.  Promises of pre-orders on the 15th have been broken, and it seems your only option is to basically tap up at a store or hope a call/internet order gets through.  Disappointing.

That said, whilst obviously I would prefer to have the phone on launch day, I think I can probably tolerate being a bit more patient.  Certainly I can’t be arsed to queue up on 24th outside a shop without any guarantee there is a handset reserved for me on the premises (which is what the nice shop near where I work did when the 3G launched).  So I might just order online when I can and see when it turns up.

In other iPhone news, Apple are pushing their new operating system, which I have the release candidate for.  When the new iTunes came out last night I wondered if it would work with it – as it does apparently on the 9.2 beta for Macs.  So I tried, foolishly.  It installed fine, but wouldn’t activate – so I had a tantalising glimpse of the wallpaper for OS4.0 but only the ability to make emergency calls.

Oh well, restore then, huh?  Well… iTunes told me that it couldn’t downgrade a firmware.. dilemma or what? It ended up with my poor iPhone in a ‘Recovery Mode Loop’.  Luckily the PC upstairs hadn’t been upgraded to iTunes 9.2 so I was able to restore to 3.13, then use the iRecovery tool to force the activation through…

It wasn’t the best idea I ever had late at night as I sat there with all my music, settings etc being synced back to my now restored phone into the wee small hours.  So there you go, don’t try it unless you find a more reputable guide than me!

Next week we’ve got a few days off, it’ll be good to have a break from work even for a few days – I think I seem to have reverse-seasonal-affective-disorder, quite content to be there around winter but in summer it’s less fun… feh, I’m sure it’ll all seem much better after a bit of time out and going back with a cleansed mind.  Or something!

One amusing thing at work this week was, as part of a charity day, the powers that be are organising a talent show.  Four of our team have entered (despite having no talent) to do a ‘Stars in their Eyes’ style performance as KISS.. as part of the submission we had to make a video, which – unbeknown to us until someone told us – is now on a loop in the cafe area in our office… because it would seem that nobody else has submitted one.  Could be fun!

Which leaves later this month when I have very exciting plans afoot, which I am sworn to a degree of secrecy over… but it’s almost upon us, which leads to both excitement and nervousness on my part!

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World cup musings..

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Alan

I keep thinking I should get back in to writing on here really, but then when it comes to it you’re faced with a massive blank white box.  There’s lots of interesting things going off – the World Cup is about to kick off, and that means there’s always lots of people getting offended that somebody might get offended by St George’s flags (in reality I suspect nobody does), largely thanks to the gutter press getting simple people riled up, and the people in questions being – frankly – morons.

Having said that, it’s helped me clear out my Facebook list – a useful filter was to delete people (and there was a depressingly large number of them) who sent me invites to groups devoted to “Stop pubs banning football shirts” or “Stop them foreigners stopping us put our flags up”.  It gets on my nerves something rotten – maybe it’s because I’m not especially patriotic – but then, I don’t begrudge those who are, and don’t think the average ethnic minority on the street does either.

Pah.  I like the World Cup but do struggle to motivate myself quite to the level I do for domestic football – certainly I’ll be watching England’s games and probably a few of the other tasty fixtures too, but, well… it’s just not Forest for me, I’m afraid.  Plus it’s a handy defence mechanism to limit expectations to avoid disappointment, something that being a Forest fan is perfect practice for.  Personally I don’t think England are good enough to challenge really – I predict the customary quarter final exit.

The other inevitable byproduct of an international football tournament is the endless tenuous advertising campaigns hung on the back of them, which is largely tedious and boring – however, the resurrection of the ‘John Barnes Rap’ from the 1990 New Order song ‘World in Motion’ for Mars is a stroke of genuis – although Barnsey perhaps should’ve held out for cash rather than being paid in Mars Bars!  See for yourself:

On the flip side, there has also been a significant crime against music committed by the third re-hash of the Lightning Seeds/Baddiel & Skinner song ‘Three Lions’ – I’m not even going to link to it, because it will make you want to stick knitting needles in your ears and take a cheese grater to your eyeballs.  Whoever thought that was a good idea wants locking up!

The final mood-getter-inner we’ve been indulging in at work – as well as the ubiquitous sweepstake (I got Germany) is collecting the Panini World Cup stickers.  There are 638 of these badboys to gather (might even be 640 if you count 00 and 000).  Six or so of us are sharing an album and having gone on a campaign of purchasing, we’ve entered the ‘swap phase’ and currently have only four stickers left to acquire (I believe – some are in transit).

I can’t say the experience has quite equated to my childhood memories but then I only recall having one domestically based football sticker album as a kid – amongst my peers the vogue was bizarrely World Wildlife Fund stickers, as well as Beano/Dandy ones.  Maybe Star Wars too.  Certainly Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter have made the experience a lot more efficient in tracking down swaps!

Other than that I can think of very little to write about aside from something I can’t go in to details over, but I picked up a phone call earlier in the week which was both a complete surprise and immensely exciting, but I’m sworn to a degree of secrecy about the details.  So, one or two readers who bother their arses to read these posts, you shall have to wait and see what I’m going to be up to…

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