After five amazing years at Last.fm I decided to hand in my notice a few months ago, my last day was at the end of August. As a parting gift and sign of appreciation of the many things Last.fm has given me I produced a series of data visualisations of the scrobbles of all Last.fm staff, alumni, and community moderators I could find, and published it last week. In total the series encompasses 8.7 million scrobbles across ~180 graphs. The visualisation is a structured heatmap that is designed to reveal periodicities: years, months, day of week, hour of day. Storytelling …

» Full entry

Last weekend I was at the music hack day in London, organised by Dave Haynes and James Darling: a two-day event where software developers met up and wrote music-related software (or built hardware.) Instruments, a distributed content resolver, various SoundCloud tools, etc. Although the event attracted lots of interesting people from all over the planet (well, Europe) I ended up coding most of the weekend instead of talking. (On that note, I'm still amazed by the amount of time coding requires, even after you learned how to channel your ambitions more efficiently. Software development is still a painful process.) I …

» Full entry

Over the past extended weekend I created Pool Radio, a tool that provides access to hopefully interesting Last.fm radio stations. See also the announcement in the Subscribers and their tag radio stations group forum, with some great comments by Nectar_Card. I'm aware that not a lot of people will find this site very useful, but people with an appreciation for the random and obscure can definitely benefit from it. Here are a couple of great user tag stations I've enjoyed over the last week: raw_u's etiopia tag radio (tag page), jirkanne's lllllllllllllll tag radio (tag page), JessiCoplin's scott storch tag …

» Full entry

Yesterday on the tube to Brixton I saw an ad for a really exciting product: a prepaid MasterCard. The promise was the possibility to take part in financial transactions that require cards (phone/Internet shops) without having a bank account. Which is a huge fucking deal. For me personally there are already two use cases that make it worth the fees: Having lots of cash but no bank account. Happens to drug traders and women traffickers, but also to people who move to a foreign country for a job. Especially when that country happens to have strict banking laws that …

» Full entry

Oh boy. The new Rough Trade store (inside the Old Truman Brewery, just off Brick Lane) is the bomb. Seriously. Lots of space, great music selection (with a slant towards post-punk, but also lots of stuff between German minimal, Independent Hip Hop, Americana, ...). Most artefacts decorated with brief one-sentence descriptions. Great personnel. An entrance area with lots of seats, a bar for coffee, drinks and snacks. Open wifi, which I used to rip the CDs I just bought so I could listen to them on my way with all metadata in place. Beautiful interior, somewhere between bleak Berlinian …

» Full entry

Unfortunately the stationers was out of black tape. I like the simplicity of this model, it's even more reduced than the old one. Less movable parts. The old one was a large piece with small bits glued on -- this one basically consists of two large pieces and some tape to close the sides. Four pockets inside, one outside for bills. Am now considering cutting the continuous flap in half, to create one flap for each side. …

» Full entry

As recently mentioned I was looking for useful hacks for the iPod Notes feature, and as Google didn't turn up much of interest I started writing one myself. The obvious first application: an offline feed reader. Turns out it's remarkably easy to do this. The Notes file format is basically text with some HTML markup, and even allows for links between individual documents. I.e., converting a feed into a series of notes and an index is pretty straightforward. The harder part is the syncing mechanism. My requirements were: syncing has to work on a default OS X installation, it …

» Full entry

If I worked at apple I'd change my useragent just to mess with people. …

» Full entry

Just saw this at a bookstore. Flicked through it, looks great, doesn't seem like a fluff piece. Lots of mathematical symbols everywhere, transformation methods etc. Will buy lots of stuff like this when I'm rich. Update Look what I found: Privacy Preserving Data Mining Bibliography, a categorized collection of papers. The table of contents provides you with a brief overview of the research field. Judging from the title, the paper you (and I) will want to check out is State-of-the-art in Privacy Preserving Data Mining by V. S. Verykios, E. Bertino, I. N. Fovino, L. P. Provenza, Y. Saygin, …

» Full entry

Douglas Coupland - JPod. Page 190 of 449, as seen through the lense of my alien surveillance equipment. (view all) OK the last two entries were kind of a downer, so before the rest of my remaining readers jump the sinking ship I thought I should resume with something a little more consumer-friendly. I just finished Douglas Coupland's "JPod". As almost every other reviewer will tell you it's like an updated version of his early 90ies "Microserfs", which means it won't win huge literature prizes, but instead is light entertainment with a lot of insider jokes, jargon, an pop …

» Full entry

Via http://del.icio.us/deusx I found Pointless Waste of Time's Life After the Video Game Crash, and enjoyed it. As the rest of the site had some other great bits and commentaries I started looking for a feed, but it seems there is none. So I made this instead: Pointless Waste of Time RSS Feed. It's really just an approximation, as Feed43's limited pattern matching abilities clash badly with the handwritten (and inconsistent) pointlesswasteoftime markup. Go visit, it seems like an interesting site. I'm not much of a gamer by any measure, but I'm a sucker for pop culture references and insightul …

» Full entry

By pure chance I just stumbled over a Pandora's box of weird podcasts. Starting point was a great experimental/minimal techno track by Aldo Tamarind in the de-bug podcast -- see http://www.de-bug.de/pod/archives/1197.html. The music for that episode used to be stored on http://tamarind.podspot.de/, but by the time I got there (i.e., now) all content on that page was gone. Damn! So I started googling which led to some page on podspider.de -- don't go there, the page sucks hard, but the podcasts the page referenced were amazing. Quote: "related categories: eccentric, classical, religion & spirituality". Chrchrchr. E.g. http://cba.fro.at/show.php?lang=de&sendungen_id=14 -- Recordings of …

» Full entry

I just came home from an interesting discussion: the "tesla salon" had a session at club Podewil with the topic "verwertungsgesellschaften im digitalen zeitalter" (roughly: "collecting societies in the digital age"). The event was organized by Radio 1:1. They had a well-chosen group of participants: Tim Pritlove in his role as podcaster and "discordian evangelist", Julian Finn as a representative of FairSharing (i.e., the culture flat rate), and two netradio guys whose names I haven't written down and who sadly aren't mentioned in the program. Update 2006-05-04 -- Igor writes to ask if the session will be published as podcast …

» Full entry

I just got a mail from Patrick, a friend of mine whose job mainly consists of working on very cool interfaces all day long, and who some time last year started circuit bending with his friend Dennis. They took apart cheap children's keyboards, soldered random bits and pieces onto their circuitry, and then presented their setup at last week's dorkbot at c-base here in Kreuzberg. Sadly I missed the performance, but there's a video ("circuit benders from hell", 30 MB Quicktime -- I don't think he minds that I share the link). Look ma, they're using my mixer! (An …

» Full entry

2005-09-16 15:30-16:30 Moderator: someone from Musikwoche We were told that the panel was about the evolving possibility of artist self-management, which sounded pretty exciting; but as with the previous panel, turned out to be too business-focused and didn't contain any really new ideas. I expected some thoughts about Internet distribution and new communication channels, but those topics didn't appear at all. Surprisingly the most interesting aspects of the panel were the insights into DJ Bobo's business life; take a closer look at his numbers quoted below. The overall theme of the panel seemed to be: it's less about the music, …

» Full entry

2005-09-16 14:30-15:30 Moderator: Joe Taylor, Record of the day Surprisingly the panel was mostly about ringtones -- it turned out interesting nevertheless, even if the participants enthusiastically painted a picture of a brave new world that to me looked rather devastating. Note: I forgot to write down the full list of participants. From memory: someone from Jamba, Record execs from both Indie and major labels, and someone who develops ringtones and was involved in the production of the crazy frog. Also note that we missed the start of the panel, so the first 30 mins or so are missing. And …

» Full entry

Strange, the DVD format is only ten years old and already on the verge of being obsoleted. In two years time everybody will buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. But those will be out of date in five years as well, because by then everything will be stored on hard drives, and rented off the Internet. From then on new data formats will appear every couple of months, but nobody will care because thanks to DRM all content will only be consumable for a couple of days anyway. You will stop updating your home entertainment center to accommodate new physical content mediums, …

» Full entry

I own a simple MP3 player by a German company called dnt, the player model is called "Fun 256". It doesn't have any fancy features, doesn't play OGG, and occasionally chokes when presented with high bit rates, but it's adequate for my needs. When I started using iTunes this spring I made up for its lack of generic player support by using a combination of a dynamic playlist, the "Copy files to folder" AppleScript from Doug's Scripts for iTunes, and an AppleScript that marks selected tracks as played. This way I could fill up the player with songs that I …

» Full entry

I already gave a basic description of Pandora in my previous article, "Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm". Brief recapitulation: Pandora is a music streaming service that lets you control the kind of music that is played. You can define "stations" by bookmarking song titles or artist names, and the site then plays music that shares similar properties with your selected songs. In contrast to Last.fm, which is a social network, Pandora builds on a concept of rich metadata to find relationships between individual songs. This time I had the opportunity to actually use the system, so this should make an …

» Full entry

…

» Full entry

Just saw a guy on a bike who was listening to Hip Hop playing on his cell phone. He was actually using it as a music player, not as a ringtone; and while he was riding along he subtly grooved to the music, occasionally glancing around if he was passing anyone he knew, or if anyone was watching. It seemed strange at first, but then I realized that I had seen this before, in a different context: There are more and more young people on the streets and in parks who use their cell phones as a way to play …

» Full entry