Archive for April, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut dies
Does your mobile go to voicemail on the bedpost overnight?
My mobile phone’s voicemail service has been bugging me for a while: on my Sony Ericsson and now, the Blackberry, if I don’t answer a call within two rings it goes to voicemail. Naturally people only call when I’m in a different room to the mobile.
It turns out that the solution is “extended ringing”, which enables you to specify how long your phone should wait before diverting the call. It’s a code that you type into your phone’s keypad, and in my case (I’m with O2) it’s this:
**61*901*11*XX#
Where XX is the number of seconds the phone should wait, in increments of five - so if you want it to wait 15 seconds XX would be 15 and so on. One you’ve typed it, just hit the call button to update the settings.
No idea if the code works for every phone, and I’d imagine it’s different on different networks. But it’s nice to know such a thing exists.
Speed kills perfect pop (and medleys make it worse)
Here’s a wee mental experiment for you: think of the main riff from Saturday Night Fever. It’s a fantastic, swaggering, loping thing, isn’t it? Now, slow it down in your head. Not much - just a little bit. Hear how it drags?
Okay. Take it back up again and the swagger should be restored. Now, speed it up - again, not much, just a little bit. It doesn’t work, does it?
Tempo is crucial to (some) music. Slow a superb dance track down by a couple of beats per minute and it loses its thrust; take a sad song, speed it up slightly and it becomes as emotional as karaoke. It’s something that used to do my head in when I played in a band, because occasionally we’d do a song just a little bit too slow and if we didn’t stop and start again, it’d be like wading through mud. Horrible, horrible, horrible.
There’s a point to this, honest. I went to see Sugababes last night and while they were in fine voice and their backing band wasn’t too annoyingly muso, their best stuff didn’t quite work. The fast songs were a little too slow - so Red Dress dragged when it should strut - and the slow songs were a little too fast, so Too Lost In You felt hurried rather than harried. And then to make things worse they did Easy - easily my favourite Sugababes song - and let the backing band bludgeon it to death, before inserting an ill-advised blast of Nelly Furtado’s Maneater mid-song. Gaaaaaah.
I’d still rather see Sugababes live than 99% of rock bands, mind you.
Another ultra-quick film review: Sunshine
Eye-poppingly beautiful, extremely tense and genuinely gripping. The last 20 minutes are rubbish, though.
Earth Defence Force 2017: fun, if you like that sort of thing. And I do
If you fancy some big dumb fun on the Xbox 360, Earth Defence Force 2017’s worth a punt (it’s going for £18 on Amazon). It’s essentially Space Invaders given the FPS treatment, and if you turn off the voice acting and music it’s an utter hoot. Particularly when you fire at a big bug with your rocket launcher, miss completely and realise that every single building in the city is destructible. So far I’ve killed about three aliens, four hundred and thirty skyscrapers, six bridges and a thousand trees. Heh heh heh.
The trailer’s on Play.com, but don’t let its soundtrack fool you: the music in the game itself is bloody awful.
Changed email address
Having an email address on a different domain from my site was getting confusing (and the amount of spam I’m getting really isn’t funny - I’m deleting 100-200 spams a day now), so to make life simpler I’m moving to bigmouthstrikesagain.com. If you’ve got me in your address book I’d appreciate it if you could change the “kasino” bit to “bigmouth strikes again dot com” [without the spaces] . Ta.
The old address will work for a while, but eventually it won’t. Isn’t the internet exciting?
Besttreatments.co.uk is no longer free
When I was deciding whether or not to have back surgery, I relied heavily on BestTreatments and its sister site, ClinicalEvidence.com. Both sites come from the British Medical Journal, and they’re rare in health sites in that they don’t have an agenda, they’re not trying to flog you stuff and they don’t reprint pseudo-scientific bullshit. Instead, they take a simple formula: here’s what we know works, here’s what might work, and here’s stuff that there’s no evidence for whatsoever.
And now, they’re disappearing behind subscriber-only walls because the department of health isn’t willing to fund them any more.
In defence of DRM
As I posted yesterday, I think EMI’s plan to drop DRM is a brilliant one, and I think come May iTunes shoppers can send the rest of the industry a very clear message by avoiding all DRMed tracks and going for the better quality, DRM-free ones instead. And don’t forget, EMI’s announcement applies to all digital downloads on all platforms; iTunes is just the first shop to sign up. However, that doesn’t mean DRM deserves to die everywhere - or at least, not yet.
Don’t get me wrong. DRM on songs or albums you’ve bought is stupid, evil, anti-consumer and all the rest of it, especially when CDs are often cheaper and don’t have the same restrictions. But without DRM, subscription services can’t work. I don’t use them, but a lot of people do - and without DRM, they’d lose those services overnight.
Take Napster, for example. Ten quid per month gives you pretty much unlimited music, and if you want you can change your tunes all day every day. Without DRM, that won’t work. Let’s be conservative and say that Napster users would download just 100 DRM-free songs per month. At a tenner per month that means Napster’s revenue per song would be 10p per song, but it’d be paying the music business 60, 70p per track (because DRM-free means Napster would get the same terms as iTunes). Bye-bye Napster.
I still think digital music is massively overpriced - in many cases a digital album is still more expensive than a physical copy, despite the absence of packaging, manufacturing, transport costs and so on, and the flat rate system makes back catalogue stuff even more overpriced - but realistically iTunes’ 99p per track is where the market’s currently at. If that falls to 1p per track then DRM-free subscription services may well become viable, but for now you have two choices: if you’re willing to pay per track you don’t shouldn’t have to deal with DRM (and come May, you won’t have to), but if you’d rather rent than buy DRM is the only way to do it.
Scott Kelby isn’t very funny. Just as well the rest of his book’s good
My quest for a decent digital SLR book took me to Borders at the weekend where, after a bit of swearing - “all these books are thirty quid and written in gibberish!” - I found something that (a) looked decent and (b) wasn’t thirty quid: The Digital Photography Book, by Scott Kelby. And it’s very good, provided you skip the chapter intros which try far too hard to be funny and which fail miserably.
Everything else, though, is excellent. As Scott explains:
If you and I were out on a shoot, and you asked me, ‘Hey, how do I get this flower to be in focus, but I want the background out of focus!’ I wouldn’t stand there and give you a lecture about aperture, exposure, and depth of field. In real life, I’d just say, ‘Get out your telephoto lens, set your f/stop to f/2.8, focus on the flower, and fire away.’ You d say, ‘OK,’ and you’d get the shot. That’s what this book is all about.
And that’s exactly what I need. If you want lots of theory, it isn’t the book for you. If you want an idiot’s guide that doesn’t talk to you as if you really are an idiot, it’s well worth £13-ish.
Are my photos any better? Nope - but at least now I know why. And I’m fighting the urge to buy a zoom lens and a tripod.
EMI and Apple: brilliant
From May, EMI artists will have a new kind of iTunes offering: double bitrate, DRM-free tracks for an extra 30 cents per track. Excellent, and about bloody time too.
The really smart thing for iTunes users to do now would be to boycott *all* DRMed music on iTunes and fill yer boots with EMI’s DRM-free offerings and nothing but EMI’s DRM-free offerings. Money talks.