I am underworked and overpaid.
It’s Friday. Paycheck, come to papa!
:’(
A submission from Secretary Hillary Clinton.
Original image by Diana Walker for Time.
On Sunday I made my way down to the Netaudio event at the Roundhouse, a yearly event, conference, broadcast and live music convention for which my commissioned piece, a This Music Wins special outlining my thoughts on the stylistic future of experimental music on the internet, went out at 4.30pm via Roundhouse Radio and Resonance 104.4 FM London. You can listen again to the piece below, grab a zip file of all the compositions, or download them individually via tracklisting. Though trains prevented me from catching the headlining ‘Nurse With Wound’ at KOKO that evening, I did manage to catch an interesting set from abrasively captioned ‘Cuntbucket’ - who played a seemingly improvised and jazz-infused noise piece for around 40 minutes up in the open space. Check them out here.
Listen to / download the broadcast (MP3)
1. Mount Kimbie - Maybes (MP3)
2. Dorian Concept - Forced Laughter Might Save Your Life (MP3)
3. Is And Of The - Sleepless Dream (MP3)
4. Kuhrye-oo - Soul Handsome (MP3)
5. Of Oceans - In Love, Not Limbo (MP3)
6. Joasihno - Von (MP3)
7. Fishing - White Sheet Beach (MP3)
8. Matthew Dear - Slowdance (How To Dress Well Seance) (MP3)
9. Ricky Eat Acid - Anxieties ft. Rachel Levy (MP3)
10. WU LYF - Concrete Gold (MP3)
11. StaG - Tired (MP3)
12. Woodsman - Chants (MP3)
13. Twin Sister - Milk & Honey (MP3)
14. Tamaryn - Sandstone (MP3)
15. Young Prisms - Breathless (MP3)
16. Carnivals - Leeda (MP3)
17. Gold Panda - Quitters Raga (MP3)
18. Mutual Benefit - Piano Experiments In An Abandoned Hospital (MP3)
Dr. Asymptote or: How I Learned to Stop Wasting Time and Love Software-Driven Personal Efficiency
Recently, I’ve been implementing a lot of changes in how I run my life, with the vast majority of them being software-driven. The sad part is, I’ve been meaning to do something about it for a while…it just took me a while to hit my tipping point and start actually making changes. Here’s just a smattering:
- I started using Evernote, and managing my to-do lists with with the excellent Secret Weapon GTD system
- I got Dexpot, an excellent virtual desktop application sort of like Spaces on Mac OS, and learned to separate “work” from “social” applications with automatic application moving rules, to prevent distractability.
- I “virtualized” my dumb cell phone number using Google Voice, and gained the ability to track my text messages via the Internet — even if I don’t have cell signal.
- I got an account at GVMax and got it to automatically forward me my Google Voice messages as GChat IM’s — so I can treat texts like other IMs on Trillian, my preferred multiplatform chat client.
- I started using the Google Music Beta (now part of Google Play) and got it to upload most of my FLAC music library as CBR320 MP3’s. There are still some gripes and bugs I’ve had about the mostly-automatic upload process, but I’ve been getting encouraging responses from Google’s support team…so here’s to hoping those issues iron themselves out! It’s awesome having essentially a free version of iTunes Match that doesn’t rely on the Apple ecosystem.
- I got Daniel Slaughter’s excellent Google Play Scrobbler Greasemonkey script, which lets me, well, scrobble my Google Music plays.
- I used a Linux virtual machine (through VirtualBox) along with MP3FS, which creates a virtual filesystem of transcoded MP3s on the fly from any directory you point it at. No more need to painstakingly mirror my FLAC collection to transfer it to my iPod!
- I got 1Password, an excellent password management software/Chrome extension, which not only syncs my passwords in a secure manner (to my Dropbox), but also generates new, strong passwords for any new accounts I create online. Having an offline backup of all my saved passwords in case my browser settings get hosed? Hell yeah.
- I finally got myself Launchy, to avoid having to wait for Win7’s start menu to load
- I just set up an account and recipe at ifttt.com, to automatically forward posts I’ve tagged as “blag” on this Tumblr blog (including this one!) to my Facebook Newsfeed, via Tumblr’s RSS features.
Having 75% of the manual, time-consuming tasks of my life operate on a “fire-and-forget” basis…much like Colonel Ripper of Dr. Strangelove (did I give away the pun? haha) — amazing.
ok lets see if that thing with glasses chicks suddenly becoming super weird feminine when they whip off their glasses works
woop
well that was anticlimatic wait
wait
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON
What that is dumb and does not happen.
Look,…
(Source: sassylesbianluka)
Behold: Domaster & Tetrawing — heroic Nintendobots! Transforming from Game Boy system & Tetris game to robot & bird, and back!
The name Domaster is an amalgamation of “Dot Matrix with Stereo Sound”, the blurb written above the screens of old Game Boys. The name Tetrawing was coined by New York burlesque girl Dangrr Doll (@dangrrr_doll on Twitter) who does a nerdy Tetris-themed routine with D20 Burlesque!
This project was the sequel to my popular Nintendo/Transformers crossover, “Plasmashock” the NES Zapper. I spent about a month or so (give or take) working on this Game Boy and cartridge — the latter of the two took freakin’ forever to engineer properly. The final touches of the Game Boy came the custom water-slide clear decals that I printed for the first time ever, and surprisingly didn’t screw up a whole lot (aside from the obvious crooked “Nintendo Game” half above the right thigh of the robot). Also, the “Dot Matrix” label printed out much darker than expected on my laser printer, ergo it’s hard to see — but the blue-on-gray text for the buttons and Game Boy logo look damn fine! As for Tetrawing, his sticker is actually a high-res computer printout on glossy paper, cut apart like a puzzle and decoupaged to his LEGO frame with the help of Elmer’s Glue.
The 2 AA battery blasters are a nice touch, if I must say so myself. It wasn’t really difficult trying to engineer a sturdy but hollow system for the back of the legs to keep the two batteries — if anything, the head and arms took the longest to build on the robot. The arms turn sideways and fold behind the screen, whilst the head is attached to a series of hooks and hinges to fold back. The robot’s feet fold at 90° angles and then slide into the lower legs. The legs rotate and form the bottom of the Game Boy. I used tiles to create the D-pad, A & B buttons, and the Select/Start buttons — which also took some time to figure out — originally I had planned to use thin, small gray bars to be the Select/Start buttons, and even tried using the small headlight clips from Star Wars Clone Trooper helmets.
-Baron von Brunk
