Buying music was always quite an experience. I would spend weeks, months and sometimes longer saving up to buy some new music. Whether I knew exactly what I wanted or just wanted “something else by this artist” I would spend some time browsing the racks weighing up what was the best value for my money. In the days before the internet, if you wanted to research an artist’s back catalogue, you were generally out of luck unless you had access to books about the artists. This lead to the thrill of finding a hidden gem in the racks that you didn’t know existed or had only heard rumours about. The anticipation of listening to the new music would build even more because I would have to wait until I had travelleled home before I could listen to my new purchases.
Nowadays, with the dizzying amount of music constantly pumped into our ears through the internet, radio, advertising and the plethora of styles and genres, it is difficult to sift through and find artists and music that really speak to you. Luckily, there are websites available to catalogue releases by artists so you are able to do thorough research and even preview your music before you purchase it. Of course the distribution methods have changed massively too. No longer do I have to wait until I can make it to a brick and mortar store to hand over my cash. I can now not only buy physical musical releases on CD or Vinyl online and have it delivered to my door, I can also buy digital music through iTunes, Amazon or Bandcamp or even stream the music straight to my ears through services like Spotify or Rdio. Whilst these online sales avenues are great for artists to be able to sell directly to their fans, I feel that some of the magic has been removed from the purchasing of music for me.
Listening to the music used to be an even greater event than purchasing it. After having spent the time saving up for the purchase, then the time carefully choosing the music to buy and getting it home, I would then sit myself down and listen to the music. I would immerse myself totally in the music and only listen to it (I might read the liner notes if I hadn’t exhausted them on the way home). It is difficult to imagine doing one thing for 45+ minutes without the constant interruptions from smartphones, tablet computers, games consoles and televisions these days. I can’t rememeber the last time I listened to music on good speakers or headphones (generally I listen on crappy computers speakers or to compressed audio on my iPhone through crappy headphones) without reading Twitter, replying to emails or reading copiuous amounts of information about the artists on Wikipedia. This all serves to distract from the actual enjoyment of just listening to the music.
The actual act of writing this blog post has called into sharp focus the main reason why music doesn’t seem to affect me nowadays as much as it used to - because I don’t experience it in the same way. My life has changed, I have more resposibilities and less time to just listen which makes the convenience and speed of buying digital music online much more appealing. You would think that this ‘instant music’ should be instantly satisfying but for some reason it doesn’t seem to work that way.
I wonder if I am the only one experiencing this? My tastes in music have definitely changed a lot over the last few years, but I still find it hard to find music that I want to listen to again and again. I’m hoping I’m not alone in this, alternatively I’m hoping someone might read this and recommend some awesome music to me and cure this weird musical apathy I appear to me suffering from.
]]>Clone full subversion history into git repository (warning, may take a long time depending on how many commits you have in your Subversion repository).
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-s signifies trunk/ branches/ tags/ exist in the svn repo (standard repository setup)
Create branch for local changes and check it out
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Make my changes in the branch… Make my commits in the branch…
Change back to master branch
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Merge branch as one commit to master
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Commit changes to master branch:
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Push changes back to svn:
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Resync local_changes to master:
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.. I thought I’d record it here.
This assumes:
Do the following:
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Done!
]]>Here is my girlfriend Becca’s new site to showcase her jewellery designs. At the moment just a holding page. I present:
Squared Paper Designs - I removed the link as it now points to another unrelated site.
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.. and that should be it. As I understand it, the ‘magic’ part tells the compiler to look in the right place for the readline library.
UPDATE: I suggest you now ignore this and use Homebrew where I have contributed an lftp recipe.
]]>Apple Quick Tips: Weekly, short tips on how to use Mac OS X. These are often things I already know, but sometimes the odd gem of a tip comes up.
Best of Chris Moyles Enhanced: Since I don’t commute to work any more, I seem to not catch much of this show when it’s on in the morning, so I catch up on it with the podcast.
CNET TV’s Loaded: A (generally) less than 5 minute look at the latest news stories in Tech. Presented by Natali Del Conte.
The Collings and Herrin Podcasts: Weekly musings from Richard Herring (ex of Herring and Lee) and Andrew Collins (ex of Collins and Maconie). Often quite crude, always very funny.
Diggnation: A hilarious look at the weeks top stories from digg.com. Presented by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.
GeekBrief.TV: Shiny, happy Tech news.
Hak5: Info and tutorials on all sorts of geeky topics.
Layers TV: Short tutorials, competitions and news about all applications in Adobe Creative Suite.
The Perfect Ten with Phill Jupitus and Phil Wilding: The first podcast I’ve heard with rules: * 10 Subjects, drawn at random from a fine-looking hat * Only 30 minutes for the lot * No returning to subjects - EVER! It ruins the time/space continuum. Another very funny podcast.
Photoshop User TV: Tutorials, news and competitions focused mostly on Photoshop (and sometimes Lightroom).
Pixel Perfect: Presented by the Photoshop wizard that is Burt Monroy. He shows you how to create all sorts of things from scratch in Photoshop.
Robert Llewellyn’s Car Pool: The actor behind Kryten in Red Dwarf and presenter of Scrap heap Challenge. Drives people around in his car and has a chat with them. Fantastically simple concept which makes for a great podcast.
Scam School: Bar scams and tricks. Another great podcast from Revision 3.
SModcast: Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier (with occasional guests) chat about anything and everything.
Systm: Patrick Norton, David Caulkins and Roger Chang talk you through all sorts of geeky projects. From building a robot, to making a Media PC.
]]>Amazon launched their MP3 store just before Christmas and I bought Seasick Steve’s album “I Started Out With Nothing” to try it out. I found the experience pretty painless and was very pleased with the service for £3 an album. I didn’t really buy any more music from Amazon until I received an email with a £3 voucher in it for use on Christmas day and Boxing day.
I finally remembered to use it on Boxing Day evening and I picked 2 albums to download (Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid and Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob). I checked out, paid and the realised I’d forgotten to use the voucher! I cursed my own stupidity but then forgot about it and started listening to the music.
Today, I received an email from Amazon saying the following:
‘We are writing to you with regard to our recent MP3 Christmas promotion. As your order XXX-XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXX qualified for this promotion, we would like to offer you a refund of GBP 3.00.’
Thanks Amazon! This means despite me forgetting to use the voucher (like an idiot) I still received the £3 discount! I was so impressed with this customer service that I had to break my month long blog silence to post about it.
]]>I ran the 7 pass erase on an 80GB Hard Disk and it took around 4.5-5 hours.
Hope that helps someone.
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]]>Just a quick note to mention that I got both of these lolcat images off of random websites whilst searching for ‘happy cat’ or ‘sad cat’, so I don’t own the copyright. If you do and you don’t want me to use them, let me know.
]]>I think O2 heard me:
Date: 9 July 2008 21:01:45 BST
Subject: Order Confirmation
W00t! My order is confirmed, so ought to be here by Friday!
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Bootcamp has quite a clever interface that allows you to resize your partition and then stick in your Windows CD, reboot and install. Also around this early stage it gives you the option to print out a PDF of instructions, to use whilst your new Mac is incapacitated. I foolishly decided not to print out the PDF (or transfer it to another machine - since we don't have our printer at the moment) and so when I got to the 'Which partition do you want to install Windows on' screen, I was unsure of which partition to choose. So, I cracked open my laptop did a quick Google search and found out that I should pick the partition that is labelled "C:". I picked this partition, with vague alarm bells ringing that the partition didn't seem to be the same size as the partition I had created back in Bootcamp (5GB). I pressed on nonetheless. I set it off formatting the partition and was surprised at how long it took to format a 5GB partition. In fact I started it, went out, came back home and it was still going. I began to worry slightly. I decided to abandon the install and reboot to OS X and check that everything was still working. I power-cycled. The machine booted from the CD again. I Googled for how to remove a CD from an iMac when you can't boot into OS X (hold down your mouse button for those not in the know). I then rebooted only to be faced by the horrible screen that told me the iMac couldn't find a partition to boot from.
It turned out that I'd completely wiped the disk of existing partitions. Through luck rather than judgement, just before trying out Bootcamp, I'd decided to try out Time Machine, so I had a lovely shiny backup to recover from.
Hopefully this might serve as some warning to anyone who thinks about trying out Bootcamp - make sure you print out the manual that is offered to you, and if a partition size looks wrong, it probably is!
]]>The picture was taken on holiday in Northern Ireland at the Giants Causeway. It was taken with our Nikon D40X with some settings or other (I would give technical photography details, but I don't really understand them). I then did the LAB Colour trick to enhance the colours a bit.
For anyone who reads this blog through the RSS feed, or via Planet Alug you'll have to visit the site for a change to see the new(ish) design! Please let me know what you think, as I'm not sure whether the orange still works with the new picture.
]]>Thanks Malcolm! (who incidentally has a very informative presentation online from linux.conf.au, certainly worth a watch)
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After lots of debugging help by FunkyBob, empty pointed out a replacement serializer that seems to work much better.
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