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is Boxee. Since installing it on my Mac Laptop and Ubuntu HTPC I’ve been enjoying lots of streaming TV (eg The Daily Show), video and audio – it’s especially great as a front-end for Last.fm. The interface works beautifully via remote control, and the way it presents my media library has inspired me to watch lots of files I’d been meaning to get around to. There’s also a social aspect: users can see what their friends have been watching and listening to, and can recommend things to each other. I could go on, but others already have. Some of the streaming content (eg Hulu) is US-only, but you can get around that with a proxy or VPN such as Hotspot Shield. Boxee is still in alpha, so if you’re a friend who would like an invitation, contact me. – Some friends of mine are getting broadband (at last) and I’ve been asked for netcast recommendations. Over the past few years most of my media consumption has switched to downloads, whether netcasts or torrents, accessed via RSS feeds, aggregated using Google Reader. My use of radio and TV is now mainly for news and occasional sports broadcasts. This feels like an inevitable technological and cultural shift, so I was surprised when I discovered recently that very few of my students subscribe to any netcasts. Here are my current subscriptions. As you can see, there are a lot of them! I don’t have time to catch every episode, so pick and choose based on episode descriptions. UPDATE: This post has been receiving links, so I’ll endeavour to keep it updated. I’ve just added some recent finds, such as Are We Alone?, The Bugle, and Epic Fu, and removed several others that I was no longer downloading. Audio netcasts:
Humour is such a personal thing, but Adam and Joe make me laugh. Frequently. I first got into them via their great XFM podcast. Interesting RN program about psychology, neurology, philosophy of mind, etc. Run by Tom Ellard, this has evolved over the years and is currently mainly providing downloads of John Blades’ 2MBS-FM program ‘Background Noise’. The SETI Institute’s excellent program about science and skepticism. A good arts program. Nonsense, but useful if, like me, you’d like to understand the world of finance. RN’s in-depth current affairs program. Mostly public lectures from Australia. Dubstep mixes. The Times Online’s satirical podcast, with John Oliver (of The Daily Show) and Andy Zaltzman An entertaining Canadian science show, split into bite-sized chunks. Mostly public lectures from Canada. Monthly academically-inclined podcast about digital culture. Interviews and discussion about the world of open source software. Often quite technical, which I reckon is a good thing. RN history program. Experimental music. RN interview program. Essential. A panel of experts discusses a topic from science, history or the arts. Hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Harry Shearer (Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) has a voice that could make reading the newspaper sound interesting, which is sort of what he does here, along with sketches and songs. One of my favourite shows. Interviews and current affairs presented by Philip Adams. RN program about language. A favourite, mainly because of the amusing banter between Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann and Andy Ihnatko. Movie reviews and interviews, featuring some great collages by Paul Gough (aka Pimmon). Australian national politics and current affairs. Amber Macarthur and Leo Laporte are the engaging hosts of this net-surfing show. Short talks by various Australian thinkers. Negativland’s legendary live mixing show which has been going for decades. I love this show. Accessible discussion of philosophical issues. Excellent sound art and experimental music podcast by Jen Teo. Sofie Loizou presents lovely, soulful electronica. Radiophonic features from RN. From the excellent blog on Web 2.0 etc., this podcast is good when they’re not recording from a speaker phone. Interesting lectures from people such as Brian Eno, Joline Blais & Jon Ippolito. A musical fix for the Negativland/John Oswald style cutup scene. I wish I could live in Stephen Fry’s world. Reviews and interviews. A recent subscription, I’m still making up my mind about this. Mainly short but serious political commentaries. When the topics interest me, this is a great program, with insights into the media industries. Andrew Ford is a respected classical composer who is open-minded enough to engage with all sorts of music makers on this program. Radio art is increasingly rare on the ABC, but The Night Air maintains the tradition. Its emphasis is on collage and remixing from the ABC’s archives. An Australian national treasure, the ABC’s flagship science program. Your escape to reality. The panel of rogues turn debunking feeble-minded superstition into laugh-out-loud fun. Cruel, but fair. One of my faves. Entertaining interviews with smart people – mostly writers, comedians and media makers. Church of the SubGenius. Nuff said. Mainly concerned with feature film CGI and compositing. One of the hosts is Australian, which is nice. I’m a big fan of Leo Laporte – he’s the consumate, charming tech broadcaster. The panel usually includes John C. Dvorak and others with plenty of personality, chatting about the week’s tech news. Amusing mixing from two well-known collagists. See also their individual shows below. Essential. This is one of the most interesting programs anywhere. Ostensibly a science feature program, the radiophonic production techniques take it into the realm of art. Merlin Mann and friends being silly. Video netcasts:
Xeni Jardin is a good presenter, and there’s plenty of the weirdness one would expect from Boing Boing, but I want more from this show. Maybe longer, less frequent episodes, rather than the current morsels which leave me remembering the ads more than the content. John C. Dvorak is indeed a very cranky geek, which makes this otherwise typical discussion of tech news entertaining. Some of the guests are interesting, too. I watch this so that I don’t have to read Digg.com. Like many Revision3 shows, it can be painfully frat-boy, but Alex Albrecht & Kevin Rose have enough charisma to carry it off. At last, a Revision 3 show that has a clue about art and music. This is quickly becoming a favourite. I don’t have time to read comics these days, so I watch this instead. The guy who sang ‘The United States of Whatever’ and directed ‘Jesus is Magic’ makes this amazing-looking show full of music and humour. I love this show. One never knows whether to expect serious news or something completely whimsical. Often it’s somewhere in-between. Hosted by Patrick Norton, this Revision3 show isn’t sure what it is yet, but I think it’s intended to become a relatively mainstream, viewer-friendly tech show. UPDATE: The wonderful Veronica Belmont, whose talents had been wasted at Mahalo Daily, is now co-host of Tekzilla. Roger Chang is getting more screen time too. This bodes well. A compilation of popular videos from around the net. It’s funny downloading a huge HD file to watch lo-res YouTube videos. Reviews of TV, films, comics, etc. by ‘three rad dudes’. Good production values. A very silly show featuring Dr Tiki, Johnny Johnny and Lala. Video recordings of lectures. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull. A humorous show about the stock market? It shouldn’t work, but it kinda does, mainly cos it keeps things short and punchy, with each episode focusing on a single stock. Martin Sargent meeting Internet weirdos again, this time on their turf. Whether it’s checking out Matmos’ record collection, or getting Ableton Live tips from Christopher Willits, this is a cool show for music geeks. A brilliant, melodramatic piss-take of the world of 70s smooth rock. Any others you’d recommend? I’m cancelling my Foxtel subscription. Foxtel = Murdoch+Packer+Telstra and I’m tired of giving them my money. I also don’t have as much time to watch TV as I used to. The only things that I watch on Foxtel these days that I wouldn’t be able to see on free to air are the 24 hour news channels (mainly Sky News and BBC World) occasional international cricket matches, and the Comedy Channel. For news, I can make do with ABC and SBS, the cricket I can live without (especially after the tedium of the World Cup) and for comedy there’s DVDs and downloads. What I will miss is the iQ recorder, but as I’m about to buy a Macbook Pro, I reckon I might turn my old WinXP desktop PC* into a media center. Do you have any recommendations for this? I’ll need a tuner/capture device and software – ideally cross-platform and open-source as eventually I’d like to convert the PC from XP to Linux (I’m going to test the waters first by converting my old Dell laptop to Ubuntu, and maybe experiment with Windows on the the Macbook Pro). This is all new to me, and I’m confused by the options, so I’d appreciate any advice on how best to set up a media center PC. * P4 2.8GHz, 1 GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon 9600, 3x 320GB HD, oh and a Canopus ADVC 100 video capture box, if that’s any help.
So TV weatherman Mike Bailey has decided to stand as a Labor candidate at the next federal election.
I always loved the dramatic way he’d say ‘the pressure is rising’ when giving the barometric report. The pressure always seemed to be rising. For a long time I’ve had the idea of taking a year of his barometric reports and turning them into a sound piece. But like most of my ideas for artworks (and blog posts) I couldn’t be bothered with the execution. Well, I have plenty of other things to be getting on with. Here, have a song: Luke Haines – Bailed Out (from Luke Haines is Dead) Your star is descending This party will start Bailed out, bailed out I was in traction This party will start Bailed out, bailed out Like to see something change I’ve been watching TV Carnage. Here’s some more: I’ll be on ABCTV’s program Set tonight from 11:05pm, playing Korg MS20 with the Splinter Orchestra.
After hearing about them everywhere in recent months I finally checked out the music of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, two projects of American indie singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard. Both bands have similar songs, with a tendency for bittersweet lyrics and melodies, but whereas Death Cab is an indie rock band that has been active since the mid 90s, Postal is a more recent collaboration with electronic music producer Jimmy Tamborello aka Dntel. I listened to nearly all of their recordings. They’re very enjoyable and catchy (especially the recent albums) albeit somewhat innocuous. And I watched their videos, including the Death Cab tour film Drive Well, Sleep Carefully which like most rockumentaries isn’t very good, but worth a look if you like the music. Then a funny thing happened. For the next few days my mind started creating Gibbard-style tunes. There were several of them, a few of which I imagined being good enough to record. I soon forgot most of them but managed to record one using software. The results were disappointing, which reminded me that pop music is as much about the sound as the song, and I’m not setup for making pop sounds at the moment (although I’m well sorted for experimental music!). One of the keys to Gibbard’s music is his voice, which really is the perfect American indiepop nerdboy voice, with a pure, vibratoless tone. (Although his singing is much less convincing live (on the videos I’ve seen) which is OK when he’s among fans, but really not very good on TV show appearances.)
I still don’t have the confidence to record my singing with any conviction (I’ll occasionally sing a part as a way of sketching it before replacing it with another sound). I really believe I could, but need to get over the fear – of my music snob friends laughing at me as much as of just not being very good. Maybe some lessons would help me get over that hurdle. Likewise with guitar. Not that I want to emulate Gibbard’s music – that was just an exercise, as I wanted to do something with those tunes that were popping into my head. If I actually developed any of them I’m sure they’d mutate into something quite different. But the experience did reinforce my ongoing urge to do some sort of vocal/song project. I’m just not sure of the best way to approach it. I guess the easiest way would be to start as a solo electronic project, that way I wouldn’t have to show it to anyone until I was happy with it. But it would be nice to have collaborators… The thing is that although I love a lot of indie music I’m not into the indie scene at all. The Broken Social Scene gig that I went to recently was great musically, but I found the majority of the audience incredibly annoying. I’m much more at home in my experimental music ghetto. But I’ve been listening to so much indie lately (I blame Last.fm) that it’s beginning to affect me. The other day I found myself wearing a short sleeve t shirt over a long sleeve t shirt! And I even dug out my old Chuck Taylors which I hadn’t worn since the 80s, but the rubber had turned to chalk. I went online and discovered to my delight that Converse now make them in black monochrome! I almost bought them until I discovered that they charge about 50 bucks for postage, and they won’t deliver to P.O. boxes (what’s up with that?). What’s happening to me?? I hope I’m not becoming a grup! Nah, it’s probably just a phase I’m going through… is Beauty and the Geek. I just saw the first ep and it was both hilarious and quite touching, watching socially retarded nerds and airheaded barbies trying to learn from each other.
My favourite part of this ep was when the med student geek Chuck got a nosebleed at the very thought of having to learn how to dance! I don’t know if I could watch a whole season of it, let alone the three that have been produced, but as someone who generally can’t stand ‘reality TV’ I’m surprised I made it through a whole episode and enjoyed it. These were given out at Max’s funeral. I wanted to post them earlier, but my scanner stopped working and I’ve only just got a new one.  Click on this image to read the story of an amazing life:  |
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