baroquedub

AlacrityPC allows you to shut down unnecessary services and programs before you run a resource intensive application.

Great for gamers and computer musicians… and free!

http://alacritypc.kensalter.com/

As a discipline, it’s the perfect marriage of form and function. Look and learn:

http://dzineblog.com/2009/10/27-beautiful-examples-of-infographics.html

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=108

An interesting article on the desperate need for new business models in the music industry:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/free-enemy-good/

My thanks to Ian at work who passed on this excellent blog post by Donald Clark about Autism in Academia. Ian didn’t think it diplomatic to post it on our work blog so i’m posting a link to it here myself:

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2009/04/newton-lectured-to-empty-rooms.html

An excerpt:

“Death by lecture

This month I sat through a lecture by an academic who was so mind-numbingly dull that it created genuine anxiety in the audience. We were dying a slow, internal, painful death. It was an assault on our human rights, mental torture. The content was banal, the PowerPoint screens of text overwhelmingly dull and simply read from the screen, and the delivery metronomic and monotonous. After the talk, this person was no better, unsmiling and uncommunicative. Turns out this person was a Professor of Communication (I kid you not) at a prestigious University. What’s going on here?”

btw. Other posts on Donald’s e-learning blog are also highly recommended – interesting, insightful and funny.

From e-Health Insider:
http://www.e-health-insider.com/comment_and_analysis/402/reboot_12.3.2009

Is there life after death? In cyberspace, it seems, there is. Memorial websites and pages on social networking sites have been with us for some time. But now a website has been set up that promises to send out emails and letters from beyond the grave. LastPost.com pledges to save and send letters to coincide with birthdays, graduations, weddings and similar events. “By storing letters for younger family members, senders can be at important life events in spirit, even if they cannot be there in person,” it says.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this otherwise spooky development is that it proves nothing but nothing is safe from commercialism. LastPost.com has a mission statement. It wants to be “the world’s most recognised and trusted afterlife brand.”

Listing all the files in a folder (and its subfolders) which don’t have a file extension:

DIR/B /A-D /s *.

The /B switch returns just the path and file name. If you want more information simply use this instead: DIR /A-D /s *.

And if you only want the listing for the current folder (not its subfolders) use:  DIR/B /A-D or DIR /A-D
Note that unfortunately this also returns files with extensions that DOS doesn’t recognise. This means that also listed will be files with ‘unusual’ extensions such as .jpeg (4 characters rather than 3) or .DS_Store (from Mac OS)

A suitably sarcastic article from the Guardian’s Sean Michaels on Bob Dylan’s forthcoming Pepsi advert… i kid you not
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/30/bob-dylan-pepsi-advertisement-superbowl

I’m with Bill Hicks one this one, Mr Zimmerman just forfeited all the credibility he ever had. He doesn’t need the money, and there’s just no excuse good enough to justify sucking it up to “the man”.

… well on YouTube at least…

Mashable (the excellent aggregator of all that’s new on the web) reports that YouTube now mutes videos which include unauthorised copyrighted music. The implications for mash-up and fan videos (not to mention the burgeoning DIY film-making scene) are fascinating:

http://mashable.com/2009/01/14/youtube-mutes-videos/

Will ‘the kids’ simply move on to another platform that let’s them revel in the serious fun of their post-modern bricolage?… probably.

Doesn’t seem that long ago since I got all excited about Dubstep before it quickly became formulaic and went down the same sad, sorry end as Drum’n'Bass… with producers copying the true innovators’ best ideas and turning the whole scene into an unexciting, repetitive exercise devoid of the creativity which made the genre interesting in the first place

But hang in there.. there seems to be a new musical phenomenon being born as I type which goes by the name of ‘Offbeat music’. Seems to effortlessly bring together influences from Jungle, (the above mentioned) dubstep, anticon-style avanthop, and much, much more besides.

IYB’s got a good, informative article on the subject: http://inyourbass.com/articles/44
Get excited!

Some great freebies on or linked from http://abduzeedo.com/

http://abduzeedo.com/29-great-free-textures 

http://abduzeedo.com/25-free-photoshop-brushes

http://abduzeedo.com/36-cool-free-textures

http://abduzeedo.com/21-awesome-free-fonts 

A nice article at Sitepoint covers the emergence of what they’re calling Mobile 2.0 phones:
http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=5&issue=53#5

Particularly interesting is the recommendation of PhoneGap – a development framework based on javascript and Safari/WebKit to author applications which can be ported to iPhone, Android (Google phone) and even BlackBerry. Cool!

This took me a whole morning to work this out so I thought I’d share the solution.

If you’re using embedded audio clips in your presentation but on previewing you hear no sound…

- after you’ve done the obvious like checking your system mixer settings (volume faders up, not muted etc.) and you’ve played the file outside of powerpoint (and it works) and you’re using a bog-standard 16bit 44.1kHz wav file (no strange codecs) and you’ve even copied the .ppt and the audio clip to another computer (important to copy both files as the wav will be linked to, not embedded in the presentation) – and confirmed that it works on that machine…

yet still no audio?… Well there just happens to be a 200 character limit to the file path to a sound clip (and I assume video files too). So copy your ppt to a folder like C:/temp/ and delete (then re-insert) your audio clips and all should work fine. Phew!

Navigation menus and more…

• Navigation Menus
• Minimalistic Websites
• Minimalistic Websites Part II
• Minimalistic Websites Part III
• Beautifully Colorful Websites
• Beautifully Colorful Websites Part II
• Beautifully Dark Websites
• Beautifully Dark Websites Part II
• Unique Layouts
• Incredibly Artistic Websites
• Incredibly Artistic Websites Part II
• Incredibly Artistic Websites Part III
• Innovative Flash Designs
• Examples of Creative Navigation

http://mashable.com/2008/11/03/embeddable-html-editors/

from the ever excellent (if high volume) feed at Mashable