Optimus Keyboard

The computer keyboard hasn’t changed since the days of the teletype back in the late 1800’s. The layout has been the same, companies have added function keys to perform various computer related tasks but that is about it. Until I read on the Macworld web-site this week that a Russian design studio called Art. Lebedev Studio have invented a keyboard that has a small LCD on the surface of each key. So, depending on the application being used at the time, the keys graphic can change. I suppose if you press the caps-lock then all the letter graphics will change to upper-case. If you hold the Ctrl key down then only the shortcut keys that are applicable will be lit.

Of course being a developer I could have a little fun. When our software needs to display a message saying “Press any key to continue” I could all the keys displaying the words “Any Key”. Then, after a short space of time, black them all out leaving the poor victim (er, I mean user) suitably bemused.

This reminds me of a manager in a company that I used to work for. All the managers were getting PC’s so that they could do their own word processing etc. This manager, who obviously hadn’t used a computer at all… ever, actually wrote ‘Space’ on the space bar and ‘Backspace’ on the backspace key. I kid you not… you couldn’t make this up!

The Idiots Favourite

Drivers of BMW cars are among the most arrogant and discourteous drivers on the roads. And living in the stock-broker belt of northern England (it’s not all flat caps and mushy peas you know) I see a great deal of them on the way to and from work each day.

Today was a case in point. My usual route to work appeared congested so I quickly switched to plan B which is to drive around Heald Green. The road that I use is a bit of a rat run through a housing estate and past a primary school. In a vain attempt at slowing drivers down the council have instigated a 20mph speed limit and also placed speed bumps, which are mounds of tarmac about 6 inches high and are placed at 12 feet intervals. I have travelled this route many times before and so I know what it is like. In a 4×4 vehicle that has stiff suspension the speed bumps can be pretty nasty if traversed at anything over 10mph. So I turned right into this road and over the first bump. A black pickup truck is behind me. Halfway down the first stretch of road, 2 or 3 speed bumps later, a silver BMV pulls up along-side me. I thought that he or she was going to turn right, into a driveway or side road and was in an almighty rush. But no the idiot was trying to overtake the pickup truck and me on a 20mph road littered with speed bumps that can knock the fillings out of your teeth if taken at speed. I did my usual trick, when someone tries to over take, and I speed up. This sod drove along-side me for about 50 feet before he, or she, finally decided that it wasn’t a wise move.

I really wish, using 20/20 hindsight, that I’d stopped, got out and asked what their motivation was. What they hoped to gain by being so bloody stupid. Of course they were driving a BMW so that spoke volumes.

Trent Reznor

Yes, I know that I’m a little late with this weblog entry as the show was broadcast on 6 April 2005 but bear with me and I’ll explain.

As I mentioned at the time I went to see Nine Inch Nails at the end of March at the Astoria in London. While Trent was in town he presented The Radio 1 Rock Show for that week whilst Mike Dee was in L.A. I didn’t want to miss it but considering that it was broadcast very late at night, possibly even early the next day, and that I don’t have a radio that I could easily record from, I was stuck. Until I read in a forum somewhere that it was to be streamed by the BBC for public consumption. For some ungodly reason the BBC use Realplayer for this and there was no way of just downloading the program so that I could listen to it at my leisure. Thankfully I found some Mac software called iRecordMusic which will record any audio stream, convert it to mp3 and even add it to iTunes. Without paying for it the demo version would only record 15 minutes of audio before it stopped. So I paid my money and bought the software. I knew that the BBC don’t keep these shows available indefinitely so I had to act fast. When the show was available I used the software and after a couple of hours had a hefty 137mb mp3 file in iTunes. I listened to it on my iMac and my iPod shuffle and liked it. But then again what’s not to like when the mastermind behind your favourite band is chatting and playing songs that he likes.

So, time goes by and I finally have enough web space to upload the file to so that people can download it. I think that the show is interesting enough for Nine Inch Nails fans to listen to and to hear what Trent has to say.

A couple of weeks ago Apple released iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting and one of the first that I downloaded was the iTunes New Music Tuesday podcast. This is basically an advert for the iTunes Music Store but it’s an enhanced podcast. As the track plays the album art for the song is displayed and changes as each new track starts.

Last weekend I had a little free time so I had a dig around on the internet and found a command-line application called Chapter Tool, currently only available for Mac OS X, that Apple have produced to allow people to add graphics and even web links to a podcast track as it is playing. The other great thing about this is that the chapters are selectable via a little dropdown button which is visible as an enhanced podcast plays.

I split the audio file into two segments of about an hour each using QuickTime. Luckily the BBC posted the tracklisting on their web-site so I knew what tracks were played. The Gary Numan and M.I.A. tracks must have been removed from the steam when it was prepared for some reason. I used QuickTime again to play both hour long tracks and noted the start times of the songs and when Trent does the links in between. You have to add this information into an XML file along with the track names and artists. Then I copied the album art from Amazon.co.uk for each track, making sure that the images aren’t greater than 300×300 pixels, and I also copied the link to the album. When all this was in the XML file I ran the Chapter Tool to produce an m4b file. I did this twice, for both hours, and uploaded the files to my web-site. Then I wrote another little feed XML file so that you can download them using the Podcast feature in iTunes.

It all works brilliantly well. Even I’ve spent a while clicking on the tracks or just listening to Trent saying, “Hi, this is Trent Reznor on The Radio 1 Rock Show filling in for Mike Dee”.

You can download the full mp3 version which is 137mb and has no chapter markings or better still…

1. Download iTunes, if you don’t already have it, and install it
2. Copy this feed link to the clipboard
3. Open iTunes and click on the ‘Advanced’ menu and select ‘Subscribe to Podcast…’
4. Paste the link into the URL box so that it reads ‘http://s3.amazonaws.com/carldpatterson-website/feed.xml’ and click Ok
5. Click on ‘Podcasts’ and you should see the first hour downloading
6. Click on the disclosure triangle to download the second hour

Have fun!

Please note that the copyright of this material is owned by the BBC.

Update - if you want to have the show in 15 minute mp3 files then download this zip file which contains 8 files covering the full 2 hours.

Microshites® Longhorn

I found these new screenshots of Microshites® Windows XP running with a new theme. Word around the campfire is that a hacked version will be available to download from a P2P near you sometime in 2007.

This has to be a joke right? It looks exactly like Windows XP with an Apple Theme. If you don’t believe me then look at the Start bar on the screen shots and then at the navigation bar on Apples Tiger web-site. Microshite® just seem to be putting a shine on the same old crap… but doing it very very slowly.

One thing that my uncle, who is not computer literate by any means, noticed is that to shut the damn thing down you have to click on START!

The only thing that I do quite like about XP is that when you are deciding whether to shutdown, restart or logoff is that the desktop slowly changes to black and white. Of course when you click on OK it snaps back to colour, which does spoil the effect a little.

Liverpool
The Albert Dock

Having spent the previous evening with my work colleagues and the night in Liverpool I had the perfect opportunity to visit Tate Liverpool.

I’m a big fan of the Tate galleries if only they would open one in Manchester, or even Chester, then I would visit more often. The nearest one being in Liverpool.

I don’t profess to liking, or understanding it all, but I do like seeing paintings by Jackson Pollock, especially after watching Pollock, the film that Ed Harris made in 2000 about him. I remember a room in Tate Modern which had a Pollock on one wall and a painting by his partner, Lee Krasner, on the wall opposite. What I didn’t see was anything by Damien Hirst which was a pity.

What they did have was an exhibition called Summer Of Love, Art of the Psychedelic Era. There were concert posters from the sixties, Bill Graham’s name seemed to be at the top of most of them. Henry Rollins mentioned him on one of his spoken word CD’s so I knew that he was a concert promoter. I’ve just tried to think of the name of the beat poet who always seemed to be in photos with Timothy Leary but I can’t think of his name. I barely recognised Timothy Leary. In all the photos that I’ve seen he had always been old and grey. I remember that before his death he was documenting the last days/years of his life on a web-site. Sort of like a blog I suppose. Here is a quote that I remember reading :-

I have found a new way to get high and spacey for hours and its legal. It’s called senility. It improves long term memory - in walking to the kitchen I remember fighting another kid when we were four and all my grade school teachers and my first date. It destroy’s short-term memory - when I get to the kitchen, I don’t know why I went there. And I forget the third effect.Timothy Leary

I’m not certain but I’m sure he was backstage on the Sphinctour DVD by Ministry.

There were many great photos of Hendrix, Joplin, The Beatles, a poster of Frank Zappa sat on a toilet is one image that will stay with me. Just loads of great artwork and photos of festivals, like the Isle of Wight festival with The Who.

I’ve just remembered the name of the beat poet, it was Allen Ginsberg. Thankfully there is nothing wrong with my memory, like a valve amplifier, it just takes a while to warm up.

You’ve been with the same people for eight hours during the day, then you have to suffer a little longer in the name of team bonding.

We sold some of our unused office furniture at work and decided to have a night out at the Rawhide Comedy Club in Liverpool. A meal was booked at La Tasca for 6:30pm then it was on to The Royal Court Theatre where a table had been pre-booked by our Party Organiser. The comedy club used to reside in the Central Hall, so this was it’s first night in the new, larger, venue.

I’ve always been a fan of stand-up comedians since my grandmother introduced me to an album of Billy Connolly’s many many years ago. I went to see Billy back in the eighties at the Apollo in Manchester. Then I saw Phil Coole and Jasper Carrott in Stoke, Lee Evans in Stockport and Henry Rollins a couple of times in Manchester. I don’t think that Rollins really counts as a comedian as such, he isn’t going to start saying, “Is there anyone in from Bolton?”, “Take my wife… please.”, “My mother-in-law is so fat…” etc etc. Since I do like a chuckle or three I started buying stand-up comedy videos. In fact I think that one of the very first videos that I did buy was a Jasper Carrott video. This was back in the days when people would say, “Oh! Have you got a video?” and when Woolworths only had about fifteen videos on the one rack :- snooker, improve your golf, championship fishing, a comedian and about three films, all on The Video Collection label. This was back in the days when video recorders were so expensive that I actually heard of some people who wouldn’t rent videos. Their thinking was that all someone at the video store needed to do was wait until you were out so they could break in and steal the video. At the time video recorders were the size of a suitcase and weighed the same as a mini metro.

So, yes over the years I’ve accumulated many videos, and now of course DVD’s of stand-up comedians. I was quite looking forward to the evening ahead.

The Rawhide Comedy Club also serves food. If you book a table with food you get to sit near the back. The place isn’t that vast that you would need opera glasses, so this is no bad thing. If you book just a table you get to sit at tables nearer the stage. If you’ve travelled from Manchester, on a works ‘do’, and there are six of you in your party you get to sit right at the front just underneath the microphone. I knew what was coming.

Mick Ferry was the compere for the evening. It was his job to warm the audience up, not physically you understand and to introduce the acts for the evenings entertainment. This involved asking people their names, where they’re from and what they do for a living. And generally taking the mickey. Of course we were sitting targets, but thankfully two people out of our party survived unscathed.

The acts generally improved as the night went on :- Simon Clayton was good, Alex Horne was better and Phil Nichol was the best of the bunch. He is quite manic to say the least and I thought Canadians were cultured and reserved. There are only two seasons in Canada :- winter and six months of poor snow-mobiling. He ended his set by singing “The Only Gay Eskimo”, a song which I had heard of before, only because I had downloaded it thinking that the artist was Tenacious D. It wasn’t and isn’t. It was apparently written and sung by Corky and the Juice Pigs of which Phil was a member. Thinking about it now it seems right that a Canadian should sing about Eskimos. For the last couple of verses he dragged “Steve”, from our group, onto the stage to sing along. “Steve” was giggling so much he could barely speak. To his credit he did manage to sing the last chorus in nearly a pitch perfect falsetto. I think that he’d been practising at home.