Monthly Archive for January, 2005

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MR1200 MP3 Player For DJs

Published on January 20, 2005 in music. Closed

MR1200
Have you ever wondered how difficult it is to beatmix 2 records? Does one actually have to have skills to be a top-notch DJ like Roger Sanchez or Fat Boy Slim?

You don’t have to buy a couple of Technics SL-1200MK2s ($750/piece), but have a try with the neat freeware tool from MonoRAVEIK: the MR1200. A Windows program of only 152 KB(!!) that emulates a 1200 really nicely. Start up 2 of them, drop an MP3 on both, start the first and then try to beatsync the second while the first is playing (even more realistic: play the first song at 110dB and use headphones on one ear to monitor and beatsync the second song). The Nudge/Twist system is not a sensitive as your fingers holding back or speeding up the vinyl, but it will give you a pretty good idea. Give it a spin!

* Platter behaves exactly like a real record deck – grab it and it stops, pull it backwards and it plays backwards.
* Platter can also emulate the jog wheel on a CD deck.
* Vinyl groove simulation for a “picture” of the track – spot those quiet bits!
* Choice of +8 or +20 pitch control, with separate fine tuning.
* Nudging and twisting emulation.
* Real instant start.
* Cue points.
* Reverse play.
* Pitch control inversion.
* Quartz lock.
* BPM counter (manual)
(from mono211.com)

Geek dinner in Gent : the pictures

Published on January 20, 2005 in Belgium. Closed Tags: , , , .

Exactly what a geek dinner should be like: someone blogging with a Treo 600, someone with a copy of Star Wars on his phone (no one using a phone for calling, actually), some people defending Apple, someone defending Windows (that would be me) and lots of people taking pictures.

I’ve put my pictures in a www.pixagogo.com album, those who were there and also have some pictures they want to share, can upload them to the album with the “Upload” button after the last picture, or by sending them to me, peter.forret _at_ gmail.com.

Thx to Cindy and Erwin, the Doppler crew, for organising this event, and I hope it won’t be the last!

Update 20/01: there are also pictures on the blog of Luc and Cindy.

Dave Winer’s problem and solution

Published on January 18, 2005 in spam. 2 Comments

Dave Winer
Dave Winer seems to be very excited about something but he can’t say yet what it is:

Last night I got an email from someone I’ve been wanting to hear from for a long time. There’s a problem on the Internet, a big one, that only one entity can solve. The email outlined the solution and asked what I thought of it, and asked me not to say what it is publicly. I can live with that. I just want to mark this moment. A milestone. Real cooperation. I immediately implemented the feature on one of my sites. The same message was sent to a bunch of other people by the same person. I hope they did the same. When this is announced users everywhere will smile
(from archive.scripting.com)

and a day later:

Watch this space for an interesting announcement.
(from www.bloggercon.org)

First I thought it would be related to RSS. Maybe RSS and Atom are merging into 1 standard (but then what does he mean with ‘implemented the feature on one of my sites’?) or Blogger (Google) will now support RSS as well as Atom feeds (which would basically mean Atom dies)?

But speculation in the blogosphere tends to go in the direction of Google taking into account the rel="nofollow" attribute of a link, so bloggers can make a distinction between links that Google should follow (and transfer Pagerank to) or not. A promising solution for comment spam.
(via poorbuthappy.com / gorissen.info / phaedo.cx)

Comment spam is a problem I almost never encounter. Most of my sites are created with Blogger, and they use a redirector script for outgoing links in comments:
http://www.blogger.com/r?http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com.
(cf help.blogger.com)
Neither WordPress nor SixApart (Movable Type) mention in their comment-spam combat guide. If every blog software used this trick, it would make the comment-spamming tactic less attractive!

Rediscovering Meshell Ndegeocello

Published on January 16, 2005 in music and women. 6 Comments


I recently rediscovered Meshell Ndegeocello. I had been really disappointed by the concert I had seen of her last year on the Blue Note festival and hadn’t listened to any of her CDs for that time. Basically I was disappointed to see such a talent go to waste.

Who is Meshell? A small black woman with a deep groovy voice and by far one of the funkiest bass players around.
I’ve been a fan of hers since 1993, when her first album “Plantation Lullabies” came out. She was funky, gutsy and tongue-in-cheek (“If that’s your boyfriend, he wasn’t last night”). I saw her live and she rocked. When she laid down a bass groove, the place exploded. Man, she could play! In the follow-up album “Peace Beyond Passion” (1996), she used the Old Testament as inspiration. As unsexy as that may sound, it was also an excellent album, musically exploring the borders between jazz, funk and R&B and with strong lyrics. The 3rd album, “Bitter” (1999) was exactly what the title suggests: tales of grief, deception and lots of heart ache. Who ever broke her heart, did it really thoroughly. The music was also very slow, dramatic and, to be honest, depressing. I didn’t buy any of the later albums, Cookie (2002) or Comfort Woman(2003) after that.

I was however really looking forward to seeing her again live last year. But instead of steaming funk or intimate ballads, we got ‘free jazz’. She had brought a new band of “avant-garde” musicians. It was an endless cacaphony of jazz masturbation. The only moments the crowd actually enjoyed, were those when the Queen of Wicked Bass took the front stage and showed that she still had more skill in her right thumb that the rest of the band together. Unfortunately those moments were few and short.

At least when Spinal Tap played its “Free-Form Jazz Exploration“, it was funny.