October 2011
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MIXING: Dream vs. Reality
The dream: You have all the time in the world to mix your new song which you believe to be brilliant. You’re going to mix it till it’s just right - spend time on those vocals, get the bass really pumping, get that cracking snare sound you’re always wanted, get that really cool crunchy guitar sound that’s so in these days, while also taking care to have a break once in a...
September 2011
23 posts
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This could be the most useful thing ever invented →
Why the heck didn’t someone invent one of these about 15 years ago?
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Damn your eyes! Stop eyestrain with FLUX.
If you’re used to working into the small hours like I am, straining at the glow of your computer till stupid o’clock, then Flux is a Godsend. Basically, it changes the colour temperature of your monitor to resemble something a bit more natural for the time of day in your part of the world.
Because it looks at where you are for starters, and then works it out. So currently, even though...
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Fabada Asturiana
Last night I made Fabada Asturiana. I’d seen it on a Rick Stein TV show about cooking in Spain and it looked so good I knew I had to get around to making it someday.
Well it took two months to finally get around to it and I can safely say it was AMAZING. When you eat it you feel like you’re in a Spanish castle in the 16th Century and everything.
It’s actually pretty easy to...
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The Unknown Legend Contest! →
Having a contest over here - win lots of nice stuff for you and a friend!
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A Dozen Reasons to Switch to Diaspora
It’s Opensource.
No advertisements of any kind!
You retain complete control over your private data.
No nymwars! Call yourself whatever you like.
No censorship! Post whatever you like!
No big brother spying on you!
No restrictions on post or comment length.
Animated gifs are allowed.
No restrictions on picture size or shape.
#Hashtags!
Simple and clean interface.
Friendly and...
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Psychohistory is here. Where's Harry Seldon? →
If you know your Asimov then you know that this is exactly what Harry Seldon was up to in the Foundation Series. Didn’t think I’d be reading about it on a BBC news website so soon.
Fact is always stranger than fiction. In the same way that even relatively new episodes of Star Trek look out of date without an iPad and no 3D telly.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14841018
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Getting Stuff Done
How To Get Stuff Done
Lots has been written about productivity and how to get your finger out and stop procrastinating. If you’re self employed, or have a bunch of projects that keep you occupied outside of your normal day job, then you may well feel that most of the time you could be a bit better organised and get more out of your time. And while you’re worrying about the fact that...
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Burning Man photos
Been looking at some awesome burning man photos this morning by some guy called Trey Ratcliff. Makes me want to go! Not sure if I could handle that much sand swirling around my bits for so many days, but it sure looks interesting, and I dig the clothes.
Check them out here.
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The hilarity of retarded Groupon ad copy
Who the fuck writes this shit? You couldn’t make it up. I get these Groupon emails through every day and the copy on them is definitely written by a frustrated wannabe novelist, or some clever clever English teacher who thinks she’s being terribly funny while the whole classroom just wished she’d fuck off and die. Seriously, this is a massive company sending out millions of...
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Best year of the 80s
A few months ago I was going through the 80s looking for songs I liked. Then I decided to see if I could decide on the best year for music in that decade. It was surprisingly easy and I ended up with 1984.
This got me thinking about music, and the charts, today.
In 84 the mix of musical styles in the charts was phenomenal. From the soul and groove of Michael Jackson’s...
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Dominion - Addictive and best played to metal
I’ve been playing a lot of Dominion this year. It’s a card game and what is known as a ‘deck building’ game. You get 500 cards in the base set, and each game is different as you choose a set of 10 main types of cards to play with randomly at the start of each game.
It’s incredibly addictive, and you get really angry when you lose as although there is a certain amount...
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Darts
I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve kind of got into darts. Not watching it, that’s silly, but playing it (slightly less but not quite as silly). It started in a friends garage over beers, and has become the thing to do when you’re a bit fidgety and someone needs a fag without stinking the house out.
And the problem is, I’ve become ‘quite’ good. Not great,...
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Get your finger out!
Procrastination is awesome. I’m really good at it. However, I have a number of techniques to help me stave off never getting around to things, and one of them is GTD which I’ll talk about in another post.
However, as a really quick get-your-finger-out-brain-restart, the Pomodoro technique is a good one. Basically, you set a stop watch, timer or whatever and give yourself 20 minutes to...
August 2011
10 posts
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Sparrow
I’m trying out Sparrow. It’s an email client for Mac. It’s looking pretty cool so far, even though it took all night to download / sync all my emails from Gmail. But as a gmail client that works on your desktop, Sparrow is looking pretty sweet.
I like the fact that it almost looks like the Twitter app - you can easily hide bits of it, it feels pretty whizzy, and you can shrink...
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Learning Spanish (or anything else)
Most people who know me know that I’m learning Spanish because I’ve now got to the point where I’m randomly boring them by pointing at inanimate objects and saying stuff like ‘Lavadora’ (washing machine) or ‘Perro’ (dog). I’ve been teaching myself up until three weeks ago when I decided that I’d got to the point where I needed lessons. Its...
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Any stories left?
Cast your mind back a few years to some of these headlines:
‘Lilly Allen discovered by blogging on MySpace’
‘Arctic Monkeys break through on MySpace’
‘Radiohead release In Rainbows - Pay What You Want upsets labels’
‘Trent Reznor releases NiN album for free’
For quite a few years, all this stuff was new and interesting and fed to us as the...
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Fantastical is awesome
Yeah well it’s not that exciting but I’m going to talk about calendars on the Mac. As you probably know, iCal on the Mac is pretty damn useless. If you’re used to using Google Calendar which immediately knows what you mean when you type something in, and then puts it in the right place, iCal seem positively neolithic.
Fantastical is a cool drop down menu thing for the Mac that...
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What the world needs now is..
..another stupid blog. But I’m fed up with never knowing where to put stuff, so I’ve decided to create this thought dumpster of a blog where I’m going to put anything and everything that’s getting my goat.
It might sound like more work. But in fact, if I throw everything in here first, I can find out other places for it after. Otherwise it keeps hurling itself around my...
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?