nigella and bush

good meets evil. miracles happen!

(thanks matt)

p910i

i got my new phone today. i had a sony ericsson p800 but i fell off my bike while it was in my pocket and i destroyed it. luckily i had multi-risk insurance. i could have either taken the p900 straight away, or waited a couple of months and got the p910, and optus gave me a loan phone in the mean time so i decided to wait. i'll post a review in a few days once i've used it for a while. on first impressions, it feels really solid. much more than the p800. it also comes with a cool beltclip/case.

pancake party movies

oh, and there's movies as well.

they're .hqx archived and encoded with the XviD codec. quicktime player will play them, and stuffit will expand them, winzip probably does it as well. i dunno.

chop 1 (1.3mb)
chop 2 (450kb)
chop 3 (1.8mb)
fire (2.1mb)
smoke (3.9mb)

pancake party

harry finished uni yesterday (finally!) so fred had some people over for a barbecue. we were going to have the fc challenge but it didn't eventuate. we had pancakes, though!

these are some of the better photos. they're only thumbnail size (not much room on the idisk). if you want the photos, let me know

the yok game

i've thought of a game. anyone who lives in perth, melbourne, sydney (and some other cities) can play. there's an artist called yok who does some awesome paint, sticker and poster art that i see around mt lawley, northbridge and the city. he's got a website that has a whole load of images of his work. the game is, when you see something that's on the website when you're out and about, take a photo with some proof that you took that photo, so either take it as a self-portrait with the piece in the background, or write your name on your hand and hold that in front, or something. if you don't have a camera or access to one, write down the exact location and attach it to the photo from the website. only pieces from the website score points, if it's by yok and not on the website, no goal. you could email him with the photo you took and ask him to put it up, and that would count. this includes everything, he's made some tshirts and skate decks and other miscellany, as well as being in magazines and exhibitions. if there's a photo on the website, and you take a photo of the same thing, you get a point. no double points for stuff in other cities or other things, one point per piece. different people can photograph the same thing and both get points. for this reason, when you post your pictures online, only show the artwork and not any of the background (otherwise it might reveal the location, and everyone would go and photograph it). if you're writing descriptions, post only the original image from the website, and not the location. everyone has to get a flickr account or host the images somewhere, and let me know where to find them, and i'll post it on this blog so everyone can look at your photos. photos have to be displayed, they can't be kept secret, and posted within a week of being taken. post the original image (not edited, if you want to edit, post the original along with it) so it has a timestamp. if you want to take film images, either scan the prints or post originals from yok's website. and just promise to post them straight away.

a finish date will be decided on, and four winners will be decided. most pieces of art recognized and recorded, best individual photo taken, best photos overall (location-description writers can't enter these categories), and most unique recognitions (ie pieces that no-one else found).

so try to make your photos interesting, any way you can. either the angle, or a filter, or something in the photo, or the way you represent yourself there.

sound like fun? maybe the finishing date will be the last day of summer. i know it has a lot of rules, but overall it's a very simple game. i'll have a weekly update with a tally and maybe a couple of graphs or something. you can join the game any time up to the finishing date. if you see something that isn't on the website, take a photo of it anyway, because the website is constantly being updated and it may appear.

email me and let me know if you're in!

photos in northbridge

went into the city today to kill time and pick up some ribbon cable for the podplus project, and while i was there i went back to bar open. there's absolutely nothing that would tell you it's a bar. there's a door with a sign above it that says that it's a private entrance to the strip club at the front. the bar probably used to be part of the strip club. anyway, on the wall there's some cool art by yok. i took some hi-res shots and have them on my desktop now. they're on my .mac account at full size, you can download them and put them on your desktop, too!



the entrance to the bar, just past all the graffiti



there are some really old buildings around, with what they used to use before barbed wire was invented: broken glass bottles stuck in mortar on the tops of walls. the building in the background is the art gallery.



i really like this shot. i was taking a photo from just above ground level, and out of the corner of my eye i saw a box blowing down the alley, and took the photo straight away to try and get it in, and it worked. often i find i have a good shot, but it's missing something, and it's a bit boring. this box blowing past was perfect.



i think this means "the beauty is on the street". not that i speak french. i like the guy on the poster. or rather, i like his stereo.

night on the town

went out to the scotsman last night, we were meeting a couple of friends who have just got back from a long stay in melbourne, but they had to leave shortly afterwards. then i met up with people from architecture, we went to "bar open" in northbridge, i've never been there before. i've seen the entrance but i thought it was a storeroom or back entrance to a building. it's a really nice little place, with a bar staff that know what they are doing and the music's not so loud that you can't talk to people. i don't think it's very popular, because it's so obscure, but maybe that was because we were there on a wednesday night and northbridge was pretty quiet.

my flickr account has reached it's upload limit, so these photos are on my .mac account. i look really happy in a lot of these, probably because i was very drunk. i'm nursing a nasty hangover today.



briony, matt, kathy and fred at the scotsman, not hearing what each other are saying



tineal and me. we were having shots called "pickled brains", advocaat with white sambuca layered on top. very nice. you drink the advocaat through a straw from the bottom first, knock the sambuca back, then put your fingers over the shot with a gap for the straw and inhale the vapours. gets you fucked quick.



this weirdo...



gave ben a flower. i couldn't understand what he was saying. the weirdo, not ben.





drunk people.



tom, passed out, covered in shoes (wtf?)



shikar leaving bar open.

there's a lot more photos, if you click on any of them you'll see my .mac photo album.

delish!

recent music

i've been getting into some relaxed, very simple guitar-and-voice music recently, been loving it. it's the summer that's doing it to me, making me all mellow and stuff. here's what i've been enjoying:

have you forgotten - red house painters
a minor incident - badly drawn boy
gimme some - g love and special sauce
everybody hurts - rem
dirty jeans - magic dirt
cross bones style - cat power
truth doesn't make a noise - the white stripes
nightminds - missy higgins
save tonight - eagle eye cherri
the drugs don't work - ben harper
bohemian like you - the dandy warhols
unsent letter - machine gun fellatio

now there's a great compilation.

on the other hand, i've also been enjoying dj matt hite's fuck my bitch up, a mashup of prodigy's smack my bitch up with bad cabbage's you're rude (get fucked). you can download it here. it's just so catchy!

lift shaft

here's a photo i took when james and i were finished making the time-lapse movie today, it's looking through the gap between the lift and the floor, down the shaft from the 25th floor of the amp building. go to my .mac public folder and download the original photo (flickr free accounts show a maximum size of 1024x768), it looks pretty cool. makes a good desktop image.

time-lapse movie

my friend james and i made a time-lapse movie out of the window of a skyscraper today. he set up his canon s30 on a tripod and connected it to my powerbook, and set it to take a photo every 5 seconds. then converted the photos to video at 60fps. the original sized result is pretty amazing, 1024x768. this is a smaller, compressed, internet-friendly version.

link to page containing .mp4 file.

shades of grey illusion

this really tripped me out.

take a look at this image. the shades of grey are the same in the A square and the B square. take it in to photoshop and check, and be prepared to be fucked up.



(via jimmerish)

worst g5 ripoff EVAR

saw this in some crappy wintel store.



the thing is FUGLY.

shuffle

apparently, this is the "done thing" nowdays with blogs and ipods and stuff. and i can't get to sleep. so here goes:

1. Flash Got More Bounce - Grandmaster Flash
2. Cookies - Human Traffic Soundtrack
3. Smack My Bitch Up - DJ Hype remix
4. The Game's Good To Me - 2Pac
5. Butterfly - Crazy Town
6. Entrance to Zanzibar - Groove Armada
7. It's a Party - Busta Rhymes
8. After School Special - Jurassic 5
9. Flat 55 - Mr Oizo
10. Seymour Stein - Belle & Sebastian
11. Nothin Ever Happens - Regurgitator
12. Beetlebum - Blur
13. Bad - Michael Jackson
14. The All-New Blast FM - Martin Molloy
15. I Will Make It - KRS-One

meh, not too bad...

podplus project 4

we have progress, people.

after - literally - ripping the guts out of my stereo, cutting some components off (cd, tape), extending a few ribbon cables (it's at this point i should say that i believe every electronic project i have ever attempted that didn't have step-by-step instructions, that i've adhered to, i have fucked up), i plugged in my ipod and speakers and IT WORKS.

so now i'm going to build a mock frame for the components out of cardboard, and a front-plate for the screen as well.



the huge speakers are the ones i realised i couldn't fit into the plus. the speakers i'm using are on top. the paul frank monkey is on the volume knob. the painting in the background was a year 12 art project, it's a 1980s BMW automatic transmission in a kinda surrealist style/landscape.

as you can see, i like a clean and organized workspace.

fight the power

werd.

once again, phil torrone is the coolest

he beat me to it, and made it better: a how-to for putting powerpoint presentations on your ipod photo so you can go into one without lugging a laptop. that is sooo cool.

When we started this article, we were chatting with a pal over Instant Messenger, and he said it best “that would be awesome, you roll into a business meeting all pimped out…pull out your little teeny iPod Photo and plug into in the projector and then rock out with a beautiful powerpoint presentation complete with templates from http://www.presentationpro.com/Products/Templates_Designs.asp. You would rule the boardroom.”

precisely. although i've never rocked out, per se, at a powerpoint presentation.

also, apple has adopted (partially) the bauhaus approach to capital letters that i use. it's now the "iPod photo", not the "iPod Photo". if it were me, i would call it the podPho. doesn't really roll off the tongue.

uses for the ipod photo

so the ipod photo came out, and some people (including myself) were thinking that's all-right, but not that great. so i can show my holiday snaps to people on their tv. w00t.

but then something started happening: hackers got involved.

rumors started spreading on the internets about interesting stuff to do on the photo. phil torrone over at engadget put photos along with his podcast so you can have some visual cues as you're listening to it. then he exported the trailer for star wars episode 3 to individual jpeg frames and kinda made a movie that you could "play" with the photo. i didn't see it, but i imagine you have to keep the wheel-turning steady otherwise the audio and video would get out of sync.



this guy noted that the entire back-catalog of the new yorker cartoons is out on cd, and he suggested putting them on the ipod photo. someone posted on the forum that the format of the new yorker cartoon would make it nigh-impossible to view on the photo. the new yorker is generally a one-panel comic, but something like calvin and hobbes you could break down into individual panels, and view them like that.





then at work yesterday i was thinking about the ipod photo, and i remembered some audiobooks i had called "soundwalks", little audio tours of nyc (and now paris) that you're meant to listen to as you wander down the streets they talk about. they were fantastic even for me, and i'm not in new york. i was thinking that the ipod photo would be particularly suited to this. as you're walking down the street, instead of hearing "now look at that building on the left, next to the barber's, with the arched window..." blah blah blah, you hear "now look at this building." and a photo of it would flash up. "it was owned by this man (flash photo of man), whose son (flash photo) went on to become..." etc etc.

in that scenario, audio with photos would be even more appropriate than video. there are a lot of things that only require breif visual cues, rather than rich cinematography. it's a hell of a lot easier to create a string of pictures than it is to edit video. i see the ipod photo going on to become more of a "story" device, something like a book. the ipod could be used to present powerpoint-style presentations, ie someone talking and explaining things, with a few dot points, graphs and images to go along with it.



the more i think about it, the more i would like an ipod photo. at first i thought "$135 extra for a colour screen? screw that". but now i want one, because i know that stuff like this is just going to keep coming.

notice all the pictures in this post? wouldn't it be cool if this was a podcast, and you were looking at them on your ipod photo?

bootmixed

dj matt hite, the guy who brought you "fuck my bitch up" (prodigy vs. bad cabbage), has a mashup album out called bootmixed. download it before its c&d'ed.

web-rifle

it's all over the internets so i won't bother recapping. but this idea is old, what was that bruce willis movie where he makes a remote-controlled gun that fires depleted uranium bullets? and he gets jack black to hold up the pumpkin, and blows his whole arm off? was that jack black? i can't remember. it was some fat sweaty guy with long hair. that wasn't using the internets, i guess. and this isn't using depeted uranium, killing people, and doesn't involve willis or black.

apparently the local sherrif is trying to figure out ways to make this illegal. this always happens in the us. why should it be illegal? apart from the arguments to make all hunting illegal, there's not much of a case. sure, it could be hacked and used to kill people, but there's very basic safeguards you could put in place to stop that. like giving it a limited axis of rotation. or requiring the gun to be loaded manually, one bullet at a time. and if someone wants to kill people remotely, they could always build one of these things themselves, in which case laws against the device don't mean jack.

from the cnn site:
Internet hunting idea has wildlife officials up in arms

is that a pun?

(i think boingboing picked it up first)

it goes to 11!

richard branson is the coolest. i bet this was his idea.

from the website it's not that obvious, but the dial on these speakers actually goes to 11. the rest of the speaker design is pretty cool as well, the sattelite speakers screw into the other tubey-bit so you can tote 'em around like a mailing tube. they're anodized aluminium, very sexy, and have a subwoofer.

i am so adding an "11" to the podplus.

do you all remember the video clip to "black or white", where mccaulay culkin wheels out those enormous speakers and an amp that has "loud", "louder" and "are you NUTS?" on it? didn't think so. he cranks it all the way to "are you NUTS?" and guitar-solo-propels his dad to africa.

mccaulay culkin was almost as cool then as richard branson is now.

(via engadget)

phillip torrone is awesome

the editor of engadget has just released this statement, and i couldn't agree more.


mash the planet



citizen engineers,

each week i do a series of how-tos here and there about getting more out of the technology we all have, the content we all create and the ways we can use them, share them and learn from them.

now i need your help, you see, lots of record companies like emi, disney and many others are sending cease and desist letters when people take music they listen to and mash it up for their own pleasure, not selling this music, just mixing it, just listening it to they way they want to and creating new works.

awhile ago, dj danger mouse mashed up the beatles' "white album" with jay-zee's "black album" and called the result the "grey album."

anyone who hosted the files, or even "wanted to" was threatened with legal action, now disney sent a cease and desist to waxy.org for just linking to the kleptones - a night at the hip hopera - mash ups using music from queen and ton of other sources.

the solution to end this madness?

more mash ups. millions of them. a digital, creative protest.

this is where you come in, i'm going start a how-to series on making your own mash ups, so if you make these, please drop a note on how you do it, what software you use and all that.

let's unleash a flood of millions of mash ups. with podcasting really taking off, p2p networks, mp3 players everywhere and the nature of music always wanting to be sampled, mixed and heard it'll be hard to stop everyone turning on, tuning in and mashing up.

so send in your suggestions to:
torrone@gmail.com
phillip@flashenabled.com
fill@2600.com

aim:
pmtorrone

most awesome animation EVAR

well, that was short-lived.

great constructivist-style animation with blatant political message. the video is fantastic, the presentation is a bit boring and over-done. but truly great animation. looks like paper, but 3-d. have a look.

(via plastic bag)

most awesome animation EVAR

"waking life", you've lost your title. if only the entire movie was done like this, the cleaners would have been scraping my brains off the ceiling.

(via boingboing)

macworld photoshop tips

i'm pretty competent with photoshop, and i can say that because i'm aware of what i don't know. some people tell me about their l33t ph0+0$h0p ski11z and i say oh yeah so you know all about batch processing and layer masks and all that, and they'll just look at me with a dumb look on their face. i've never used batch processing or layer masks. i'm always looking to expand my photoshop skills, because i know there's so much photoshop has to offer that i don't know about. so i got a link in my macworld newsletter with some photoshop tips and tricks, and i've learnt a lot of new stuff. have a look.

podplus project 3

this is the current workspace. i was going to clean my room today, but had a nap instead.

atm, the project looks exactly the same as the last update. just keeping you posted that i haven't done anything. i have got a lot of drinking done, though, so it's not like i haven't been productive.

if you're one of those people that gets flickr streams in your rss-feed reader, i'm putting the tag "podplus" on every podplus-related image i upload, so if you don't want all the fray that comes with the rss feed from my blog, that's a convenient way to stay up-to-date on this project. because it's going at such a cracking pace.