2009.12.27

Mag+. The Digital Magazine

Just a few weeks (?) before the rumoured availability of the Apple tablet (whatever its name is), here’s a recent demonstration of what the display, miniature electronics and battery technology may lead to in the near future in the context of magazines. If everything that we’ve heard about the impending release of the Apple tablet is true, I guess there’s a chance that the paper magazine may soon follow the CD and DVD as items of yesteryear. If anything, I am excited about the ecological, typographical and æsthetic consequences such a device might bring, but also somewhat concerned about the loss of the openness that the web has brought us in the last fifteen years or so. [via Mosh].

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Update: Here’s another video featuring a tablet version of Sports Illustrated.

Sports Illustrated – Tablet Demo 1.5 from The Wonderfactory on Vimeo.

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2009.12.14

The Books

One of the most impressive and original groups that I’ve listened to in the past few years, I’ve been meaning to write something more substantial about this for ages, but never got around to doing it. Difficult, but warm, exceptionally rich in sounds and meaning and at the same time simple, even minimalist in structure, but above all uncategorisable, The Books [on Wikipedia] make music that I’ve come to love more than most in the few years that I’ve been aware of them. It’s not just the rhythmic patterns, the exceptional sampling of natural sounds, the vocals and dialogues, the instruments that are presented in such a subtle, refined way, but the extreme attention to detail and extremely artful manner in which effects, speech samples, sounds and acoustic instruments come together in a glorious reminder of how great real music can be, no matter whether it is the result of natural or artificial means. This is not a band keen on posturing or interested in demonstrating technical prowess; their music is timeless precisely because it focuses on what matters and does away with trends. The music of The Books has soul, but at the same time retains a musical sophistication that’s rare. Open minds and open ears required.

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»  Fast ID3 tagging

This is solely for my friend saper who was recently telling me how much he loves it when people post snippets of code that they come up with during their everyday lives, even if they are relatively pointless in the grander scheme of things. Well, today I was listening to a few old mp3 files while coding more important stuff and realised that some had no id3 tags, which was a good excuse to put good ol’ PERL and some shell magic to some use to tag them all, fast. Here’s the two-minute script for tagging files based on the filename (note the ‘[trackno] – [title].mp3′ regex). I ran the script twice, once for the trackname and once for the track number (not shown below, is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader). Hope this is useful to someone, although I guess it mostly serves as proof as to how much you can do with one line of PERL/shell scripting magic. Enjoy =)

ls *.mp3 | while read f; do TRACKNAME=`echo "$f" | perl -e '$a = <STDIN>; $a =~ /(\d\d) - (.*).mp3/; print $2;'`; id3 -t "$TRACKNAME" "$f"; done

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» The real choice is liberty versus control

Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

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