Muppets album conversions:

This is a project that I was doing prior to traveling.



I spent months painfully converting these albums to CD. These albums got heavy airtime in my youth...

I carefully recorded the vinyl, then carefully cleaned the recordings by hand. Adobe Audition is the best wave editor I have ever used, and the results are fantastic. The finals still have the full warmth of the original vinyl, and no major pops or clicks. This took an unbelievable length of time, I ended up redoing the process multiple times as I learned better techniques.



I also scanned and processed all the cover artwork for the CD replicas.



The discs are printed on directly (no stickers!), and the art is a mock of the original vinyls' center label. I had to change the track numbers (no side B!) and shoehorn both sides listings onto a single side.



The sleeves are complete, with the inner and outer artwork just like the original vinyl sleeve.



Again, the track listings were subtly tweaked to reflect the single side and track numbers. Also, the back of a jewel case is not square (but the front sleeve is) so the rear artwork had to be cropped carefully to look correct. Compare left and right above.

In any case, really happy with how these turned out.

below the 42:

My mum gave me an excellent booze tip recently:



Stil vodka: this nice vodka comes from none other then 42 Below. Its their off-label, and is cheaper then 42 Below.



Still tastes pretty damn nice to me. Zing!

Recovering the mini

Heya all, me and Princess flew down to Welly last weekend.



My pal Andre got married, and we caught up with lots of you fullas down there :)

With Princess hanging out with Loulou, Nick and I went to unpack the mini and get it on to the road. The mini was stored well, and was straightforward to get on the road. All that was needed was a new battery and a damned good clean. So shes is now legit: WOF, rego, insurance.



When taking out the sub box to replace the battery, I found that a mousey had setup house in my sub box - he chewed the inside of the seat sponge!



The bastard also gnawed a hole in my sub and dragged lots of crud in there! I found him dead where you see him, the rubber and foam must have killed him. I cleaned the sub box and did a ghetto duct tape fix. Temporary, but it'll do.



I headed up the country.



7 hours of nonstop mini driving was real noisey! I did get a great day for cruising.



The mountain from afar...



..and up close - mint weather! Thankfully, no breakdowns or weird noises.

Synchronise your iPhone in Linux .. kinda

Hey guys; I finally got around to getting my iPhone to work in a Virtualbox installation of Windows. Now I can finally sync my iPhone without rebooting! I gathered up info from a few sources, and compiled it into the Ubuntu howto wiki.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPhone#Using%20iTunes%20via%20Sun%20Virtualbox%20running%20Windows

Sync away!

Digital Glitching

Saw this music video by Kanye West over the weekend:


KANYE WEST "Welcome To Heartbreak" Directed by Nabil from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Interesting how its using the errors produced by missing keyframes for artistic effect. I saw a few experimental videos like this, but to see it on A-List music videos is interesting. It the video analog to audio glitching artifacts being used in music. Interesting, but unless you are a codec master, you have little control over the effect, so this technique may have limited scope for expansion. Still cool - wonder if and encoders get confused encoding it :) ? Also, how many geeks give their satellite box a smack, thinking that the MTV feed is playing up ....

Ben Heck does it again: C64 laptop

Hey all;

I probably linked to the Picommodore C64 laptop project that someone did a while ago, it is a cool idea. I actually got myself a couple of the C64 all-in-one joysticks used in the project while I was in Europe. Ben Heck, custom-console-maker-extraordinaire has made a C64 laptop of such awesomeness that it kinda puts the rest to shame.



That is tidy. A SD card floppy emulator, original keyboard with Fn keys chopped off, and replacements by the fake trackpad (actually a LCD for the SD-floppy bridge), all the real hardware: SID chip, cartridge slot... Go look at the full writeup from Ben himself. A legendary hack.

http://benheck.com/04-05-2009/commodore-64-original-hardware-laptop

NIIICE!