Archive for the ‘ Technology ’ Category
I love these little online virtual synthetic toys. The Tony-B Machine is one of these. The samples on this one are a tad cheesy, but there is a bit of control on it to make it sound good. Here’s my first attempt at it. It just a little under ten minutes which is stretching it a bi to hold any interest, but it gets pretty sweet about half ways in. There’s lot more on the site including stats and an evolving community, so go have a play… it’s great fun.
How do you start a movement with a marker pen? What’s the connection between the nun who invented disco, and file sharing? How did a male model messing with disco records in New York in the 1970s influence the way Boeing design airplanes? Does hip-hop really hold the secret to world peace? How did three eleven-year-olds revolutionize the video game industry by turning Nazis into Smurfs? And what’s going to happen to Nike when it’s possible for kids to download sneakers?
It started with punk. Hip-hop, rave, graffiti, and gaming took it to another level, and now modern technology has made the ideas and innovations of youth culture increasingly intimate and increasingly global at the same time.In The Pirate’s Dilemma, VICE magazine’s Matt Mason — poised to become the Malcolm Gladwell of the iPod Generation — brings the exuberance of a passionate music fan and the technological savvy of an IT wizard to the task of sorting through the changes brought about by the interface of pop culture and innovation. He charts the rise of various youth movements — from pirate radio to remix culture — and tracks their ripple effect throughout larger society.
Well I’ve ordered this book pretty much straight away after finding out about it. It’s not yet available on this side of the pond so I went for the US version via Amazon as I couldn’t wait for the UK version to come out in May. It sounds really good indeed and I can’t wait for it to arrive. I will do a review after I’ve read it.
The video above is great too. I found this after ordering it and was delighted, as I had spontaneously whipped out the plastic earlier for this addition to my bookshelf!
If this has spurred your interest you can grab it from Amazon from the link below.
I converted all the categories to tags, thinking I would still have the categories there to structure the blog. The last backup was done in early December so I won’t bother reverting and just use this as an opportunity to restructure this whole blog.
I have being experimenting with different themes and plugins over the past few weeks on this and on the Tara Saga site and have managed to screw things up on more than one occasion. WordPress has recently been updated (version 2.3.2) and this meant that some themes would need some hand coding to make them work in the newer version. For some reason though on the particular blog, no matter which themes I use they always seem to default to the Kubrick theme whenever I have my back turned! I originally thought this was just with the K2 theme but it doesn’t seem to be.
Tags are an experimental new feature in WordPress implemented previously in certain themes and now in version 2.3.2 of the CMS platform. I guess it will by more fully featured in the next big WordPress upgrade due in a few months. Tags are great! They are a linking and sorting system which has revolutionised the web in in 2.0 age. When they are applied right by users they really make for a better web experience. There are so many great sites out there whose functionality depends on them and their addition to the WordPress platform should really make things much better.
So I will have to go back though the posts here and sort them out into new categories and give them relevant tags. I also need to fix the problem of the defaulting theme and sort out a better navigation system. There is a great plugin that worked for me before called Extended Live Archives but it unfortunately doesn’t work yet with the latest version. I have also been testing magazine style themes which are really ideal for this type of multi subject, multimedia blog. So hopefully this blog will be more user friendly soon and in the meantime I will make some quick fixes to the navigation.
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