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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Over the last couple of weeks I finally revived the old habit of scouting for interesting bits of pop culture produce, and after overcoming work-induced inertia it paid off well. Feels good to be somewhat back on track... I'll start off with some music-related findings. If you're not listening to anything else atm I invite you to set the mood first by tuning in to my Last.fm station of the week: The Bug's similar artists (radio URL) [Btw: Elias is already working hard on improving our playlist tuning algorithms, you can expect some huge improvements in our radio experience over …

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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 …

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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 …

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Started browsing around for interesting hacks for the iPod Notes feature (are there any good offline feed readers for that? Or anything else of interest?), and found the Notes feature guide. Which contains this gem: Links iPod Notes Feature Guide (PDF, 1.4 MB) …

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Felt like trying out virb's flash player embed. Not sure if they actually want you to do that -- after a quick search I didn't find a widget embed link, so I simply looked at their page source. You need Javascript and Flash to see the player. Alternative link (with the same requirements): virb.com/dekstop. if(hasProductInstall && !hasReqestedVersion) { var MMPlayerType = (isIE == true) ? "ActiveX" : "PlugIn"; var MMredirectURL = window.location; document.title = document.title.slice(0, 47) + " - Flash Player Installation"; var MMdoctitle = document.title; var object = { codebase : 'http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0', width : '520px', height : '276px', bgcolor …

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Bought some cheap second-hand gear from a friend of a friend, just did a quick test recording. Two distortion pedals (one left, one right) with empty inputs (dangling cables.) The second recording features an additional stereo compressor. I received some complaints about the last batch of mp3s -- these are much less harsh, I promise :) Will definitely play around more with this, but I need more cables. And microphones. Download bbq 1 -- meat.mp3 (7.8 MB, 06:50 mins) bbq 2 -- fire.mp3 (8.5 MB, 07:22 mins) …

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The Guardian recently had two fascinating articles in the context of race in their history section. First last week's 'Flesh made fantasy' by Rachel Holmes, about an early 19th century African showgirl in England, then yesterday's 'The fascist who 'passed' for white' by Gary Younge, on an influencial early 20th century American fascist and his secret mixed-race origins. After a bit of further research and some writing I found myself confronted with an explosion of interesting side-topics, so for now I'll refrain from commenting on the latter. But both articles are recommended reading material. Buttocks, Bums, Arses, Posteriors, Rumps In …

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Cheap laptop mic -> AU Lab -> lots of amplification, some EQ, compression -> MP3. I love this lofi stuff. 128kbps versions streamable on Last.fm, but you really want to download the 160kbps version linked below. I should fetch my mixer from Berlin, a little additional audio equipment opens up a much wider range of expressions. You can do so much with so little. 01 AU Lab Recording-21-25-26-344.mp3 (3.4 MB, 02:52 mins) 02 AU Lab Recording-21-32-22-415.mp3 (3.8 MB, 03:12 mins) 03 AU Lab Recording-21-42-06-649.mp3 (3.9 MB, 03:19 mins) 04 AU Lab Recording-21-56-02-348.mp3 (5.3 MB, 04:31 mins) 05 AU Lab …

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I don't typically use this blog to post feature announcements of my employer, but this one thing we just launched minutes ago is seriously cool: You can now share arbitrary Last.fm radio stations (similar artist radio, tag radio, a user's personal radio, ...) using our embedded flash player. Put it on your blog, on your fanpage, anywhere you want. You don't even need a Last.fm account to do this. Here's the officially shit tag radio: …

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Just read David Byrne's Crappy Sound Forever!, in which he relates the evolution of popular and classical music as a series of technological changes, in a brief history from gramophone and microphone to MP3. I liked his observation that Hip Hop "might be the most radical popular music around" as it's the first mainstream music purely made by machines, where the composition has no relationship to a live performance any more, where the idea of a band vanishes: Most other pop genres retain some link to simulated live performance, but a song put together with finger snaps, super compressed vocals, …

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People seem to be migrating in drones from the former golden boy of the Rails community: the Typo blogging engine. Reasons vary (Sporkmonger's Bob Aman is put off by the lack of effective spam filters) -- but I can't say I'm surprised. Never installed Typo myself, but have been curious about the surprising amount of people who deem it acceptable to replace a solid solution (say, WP or MT) by something that exchanges stability for Ajax widgets. Apparently one year later the trend-setters can finally admit that flashiness is only cool when it doesn't require cleaning up every couple of …

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I finally have a digital camera again, and it's a great toy! Used iMovie 5 for this, but don't really like how effects and text overlays work (you can't apply them to individual frames). Still, it's quite simple to use and everything works flawlessly, not least of all iPhoto integration. (Note: Youtube indicated that this video was still in the upload queue about one hour after I posted it, don't remember that happening before.) Update: uploaded the file again, this time without audio -- and it was instantly available. Youtube might not support AAC, and iMovie didn't offer any …

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(Just found this in my notes, written a couple of weeks ago, just days after coming to London.) london is quite interesting. in a way it's similarly divided as berlin is, with the west of the city as the "establishment", clean, rather wealthy, predominantly white (at least the places I've been to), and the east more interesting, racially mixed, culturally diverse, council houses and poverty everywhere, but also more "creative", shoreditch as hipsterpartytown central, the rest of southern hackney mostly lower middle class/upper lower class (which is it? dunno). interesting to move around in this city. the local dialects …

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I thought I should start documenting some of the places I found in London. I'm mainly moving around in the north-east, in Hackney, Islington and sometimes Camden, but I've also been to Notting Hill for the carnival (tourist fest) and of course seen the center. To me it currently seems like London shares a similar east-west divide with Berlin, in that the West is the more established, richer London, but the East is where it's at, where the interesting stuff happens. Haven't been to Brixton yet though, so there still much to explore. And while I'm exploring I'd like to …

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Still pretty busy right now, so still no new posts for now... be patient. Download freq08.mp3 (2.8 MB, 02:27 mins) …

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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 …

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I finally found a decent way to produce music on my PowerBook. That was the last thing missing after I switched. I haven't been producing tracks for ages -- it's been a frequent pastime for years, but I just couldn't persuade myself to work on Windows just for the music. Anyway. This track is pretty representative of the stuff I did in the last 2-3 years, if a bit more focused. I still haven't learned how to properly use an equalizer (and probably never will -- I'm just not interested enough). Any professional audio engineer will blush when he sees …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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A couple of days ago while looking for some cheap entertainment I found a two-part Channel 4 series called "The Root of All Evil?", a documentary on religious extremism around the world. Usually those kind of documentaries are a pretty safe bet: you know the positions beforehand, sometimes you even learn a bit, and they don't annoy you like bad movies do. Perfect bedtime entertainment. Boy was I in for a surprise. Because they fed me what I least expected: Atheist propaganda. Yeah I too thought that this was a contradiction in terms. Now I know better. "Why should scientists …

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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 …

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I make a lot of little notes in text files that never develop into a full article and eventually get deleted. So to change that, and to maybe even increase the post frequency a bit, I'll start publishing smaller comments. Have no idea yet which way suits me best though; first approach: assemble several semi-connected commentaries to get to article length. TextMate 2.0, which I guess won't be released within the next six months, will be a free update for registered users of TextMate 1.x -- a bold financial decision for the developer Allan Odgaard, but great for his users. …

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This must be the most entertaining short I've seen in months. A couple of very geeky Brits, introduced by a Swede, show you how they are using Erlang as part of their PABX (or PBX, as the youngsters are calling it these days), and demonstrate the usefulness of realtime, declarative, symbolic programming. Is it industrial advertising? Or educational? Or is it just an awesome piece of academic retro futurism? Is it subversive comedy, dripping with pop cultural references and contemporary irony, or quite to the contrary simply an antiquated piece of another time? You decide. It's much more efficient! "Declarative …

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In today's server logfiles: 13 requests from a host called "teamramrod.com". This is a pretty obvious movie reference, yet it made me curious enough to go check it out. www.teamramrod.com redirects to google.ca, but we can at least check the domain entry: $ whois teamramrod.com (... bla bla ...) Administrative Contact: Team Ramrod Rodney Farva 51 King St. Spurbury, ON , CA (519)5551235 () farva@teamramrod.com I thought this was rather funny. …

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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, …

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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 …

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Last week a friend invited me to visit the Popkomm, using the press pass of a colleague. Who am I to refuse a free invitation? Having never been at the Popkomm, I was curious to see what it actually was like. Another friend had already warned me that the general attraction was to meet business partners and potential clients, and that it wasn't really a place to experience new forms of culture, or a place where a lot of new bands got signed -- so my expectations were rather low. And still I was surprised by what you find there …

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Went to the cinema at Potsdamer Platz; due to some unfortunate timing the evening ended different than planned, but I had fun nevertheless. Some of these photos are illegal under German copyright law (UrhG), paragraphs 12-21, 23, 32, 52, 62 and 63, unless they are regarded as a quotation according to paragraph 51, or unless Flickr is to be regarded as "public space" according to paragraphs 58+59; and they violate articles 1, 3, and 4 of the European Directive 2001/29/EC ("on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society"), and article 5 of …

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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 …

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Another wonderful podcast from Dave Winer, which starts off as a monologue about his recent Audible experiences, sidesteps into a little DRM history, and ultimately comes to the center of the problem with current media distribution: Customers are treated like thieves, there's too much distrust, and it seems as it's building up. His prediction is actually a lesson he learned as CEO of a software company in the 80ies: ultimately users will learn in how many ways DRM screws their side of the bargain, and that's when the model stops working. This is quite an emotional podcast for Dave, and …

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Finally there is a trailer for Vincent Gallo's new movie "The Brown Bunny", and it looks interesting. A contrasting split-screen: on the left closeups of a party of twentysomethings in a bedroom, then a girl (Chloe Sevigny); possibly memories of the protagonist's past. On the right the camera drives on a deserted highway, towards dusk. Filmed in a typically vintage Gallo aesthetic, which in its reminiscent emotional appeal matches the music playing in the background. There is no voiceover or dialogue, only music. To quote an IMDB comment: "If you don't let yourself rock by the melancholic tone that …

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Greg Apodaca, a photographer and digital artist, uses his online portfolio to demonstrate common image manipulations of photographs for magazine articles and advertisements. A fascinating and shocking insight into the hyperreal. Quote: "It doesn't seem natural to me to take out every curve, to airbrush out every blemish, but what the Art Director wants, the Art Director will get." Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio Maxim Should Be Ashamed, photo manipulation gone wrong …

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Am Ende von American Splendor wird während der schönen Abschlussszene "My Favorite Things" gespielt, in der Version von John Coltrane. Die Melodie kam sehr bekannt vor, auch Bruchstücke des Textes fielen mir wieder ein. Woher denn? Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These are a few of my favorite things Google sagt es ist ein Titel des Sound of Music-Soundtracks; hab den Film aber nie gesehen. Glaub es wurde in einem aktuellen Film oder einer amerikanischen Serie zitiert, keine Ahnung wo (Friends? Hm, nee. Vielleicht …

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"The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades More art from Jason Salavon …

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Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. Thtos, manipuis iktop walls wrious. Pholated imauctant to do anges, despapers. Maybe some animhat I might do whated then ed or reI'm borlything seings, too. …

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