My main workstation where I wanted to use them is a Mac Mini which doesn’t have any 5.1 output except for a digital optical out. Now, I don’t need any 5.1 on my workstation but i do like some loud music so I quickly started looking at 2.1 speakers on Amazon and eBay. Wow, there’s a lot of crap out there.

Loads of unknown brands, cheap little subwoofers, and dodgy looking 2mm-thick speakers. So like any geek I used the power of Twitter to quickly get an idea of what speakers other people liked. I got about 3 responses pointing me at the Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II so I quickly went ahead and looked at what all that was about.

Now, these 2.0 speakers are not the smallest, they are about 23cm high by 14cm deep and 9cm wide, but in exchange for that they don’t come with a big bulky subwoofer. Most of the subwoofers that come with 2.1 systems are very small and cheap and therefore not particularly good. Add to that all the wiring and you’re actually happy that these speakers don’t come with a subwoofer.

These 2 speakers though, wow, I didn’t expect such a good sound from a 2.0 system. The bass won’t bump you out of your seat, but is great for films and music and if you want you can pump up the volume and make your neighbours crazy without causing the sound to distort. The added bass and treble control is handy for controlling the kind of experience you want, especially if you sit only 10 cm away from them all day.

All and all I think these speakers are probably the best ones I ever bought and I totally agree with my Twitter advisors that these speakers are definitely worth the money (currently about £50 on Amazon).

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Reviewing the Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II Speakers

So here it is, but keep in mind that it’s mostly useful as RSS, JSON, or PHP object.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Yahoo Pipe for IMDB Top 250

• Get healthier – I used to go running, and I used to weigh about 20KG less than I do at the moment. To be honest, I don’t care about my weight, but I do care that when I stop sporting I tend to feel worse and worse over time. So my only really must-accomplish goal for this year is to get healthier. I hope to lose some weight but it is more important to sport more and feel better over time.
• Finish or fail my master’s degree - This is kind of no brainer. This is my last year to finish my master’s degree. And to be honest: I don’t care anymore. But as it does seem like a waste not to finish it I think I have to give it one more try.
• (Co-)Organise more BarCamps - I have been involved with 2 BarCamps in London last year and although I’m not sure if I want to be in charge of organising another one I will definitely want to be involved in as many as I can spent time on. So, who is up for BCL8?
• Watch 52 movies of the IMDB top 250 – This was on my list for last year but it failed because Mel and I never set aside some time for it. Now we have a big screen and decent audio in the bedroom we might try it again. Plus we’ve actually been watching more and more older movies recently which means we’re kind of in the mood for most movies anyway.
• Fall in love with photography again – I haven’t really been making any photos last year because I guess I was pushing myself too much. I want to go back to the hobby I loved in 2008 and bring my Flickr account back to live.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - New Years Resolutions 2010

• Project 365 & 52 Themes – I completely failed on this. I came to about 100 in the Project 365 but gave up on the 52 themes after only a few weeks. I realised something very important: I am not a pro photographer and don’t want to be one. For me photography is really just a fun hobby, and as soon as it turns into something else it takes all the fun out of it for me.
• 52 Movies from the IMDB top 250 - We did try this, but somehow ran short on time. I think we maybe saw about 8 but simply never put aside any time to watch all the other ones. I guess we might have a better chance this year with a big screen in the bedroom.
• Try Linux - This is the only thing I really did, and only a few weeks back. With the arrival of my Dell Mini 10 I gave Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Mint Linux a try, but I realised it’s not for me. I agree with my original point that Linux is the best server OS out there, but for desktops it’s just not there yet. Like my friend Reinier said: why is Linux so innovative when it comes to architecture, but not when it comes to UI?

I guess I’ll have to do a blog post tomorrow with my resolutions for 2010 but I give it another night’s sleep to come up with some more achievable ones than last year.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Looking back at 2009 resolutions

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For December 6th – December 17th

In short: It’s a (RED), as in the charity sponsoring colour,  Dell Mini 10v that retails for about £250. It has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 2GB ram (custom), a 1024×600 screen, and a 160GB hard drive. I installed Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on it and things are running smoothly. Here are some photos and some notes from my experience.

The cool

• I love the colour and form factor. I wish Apple would make a (RED) laptop with a 10 to 12 inch screen.
• I installed 2GB of ram (easier than I expected) and made some more changes to the hardware by installing a different wireless module and a bluetooth module.
• WiFi (802.11n) and Bluetooth work
• Sleeping works for the most parts
• Multi touch works including 2 finger scrolling, and 3 finger swiping
• It dual boot with Windows 7
• I managed to sync some parts of OS X through Dropbox, making this machine an almost virtual copy of my workstation when it comes to some of the every day tasks.
• I installed a few handy apps to make the most out of the small screen size and small trackpad.
  • Quicksilver: Most of you will know this app, but for those of you who don’t think of it as every app and document under the tip of your fingers, without having to touch the trackpad
  • Megazoomer: Zoom any app to full screen. Very handy for browsing, although it seems to be a bit temperamental sometimes.
  • Caffeine: Prevents your machine from falling asleep when you don’t want it to. Handy for when you’re giving a presentation or when you’re watching a YouTube video.
  • DropBox: Simply the best app for sharing documents across multiple machines. I can’t live without anymore.
  • 1Password: Never need to remember your password again. Combine it with DropBox and your passwords are synced across all your machines.

The not so cool

• Installing was a bit of a pain as it required a lot of reading, diving into tutorials, and most of all knowledge of both OS X and Windows. The most useful resource for everything seemed to be this Dell Mini specific forum.
• I don’t dare to upgrade to 10.6.2 because things might break. Add to that the fact that making a bootable backup is even harder, it doesn’t make for a very reliable machine that you would want to count on for your important documents.
• This is not the fastest machine. It can play SD quality video fine, but the new generation of online videos, including YouTube, seem to be very focussed on HD video, which this machine really can’t handle.
• The standard battery only gives about 2.5 hours of battery, about the same (or even less) as my MacBook did. Where is all of  that power going?! I though these machines were supposed to be energy efficient! I had a look at a 6 cell battery which gives about 5hour+ battery life but they are hard to find in the UK and ridiculously expensive. I had a 6 cell battery with my Dell Mini 10 (non-V) but crazy enough that one didn’t fit on the Dell Mini 10v. Bastards at Dell!
• Hibernation doesn’t work (for now) and I can live with that. The real problem though is sleeping. Although the machine sleeps, if I leave it overnight it will drain quite a bit of the battery (20%). I will have to see if this can be fixed.
• I really need to bring a USB mouse when I’m off to the Netherlands for Christmas for 2 weeks. The trackpad is nice, but if you want to do some real work a external mouse is a must. The keyboard is quite useable though.

The unknown

• I’m not sure if the VGA out works, I need to hook it up to a monitor.

The future

• I might one day take out the Dell logos on the front and back and replace them with something more Apple. I already looked around and found a few articles where people laser cut an Apple logo into their machine and added a glowing apple in it’s place. It seems to require a laser cutter though, which I don’t have.
• I might order a US layout keyboard one day to replace this one. I already set my keyboard to US which means I can type as I’m used to as long as I don’t look at the keys.
• If I hit the F1 key the screen flickers, goes black, and that’s it. This button is somehow wired to do something special that the OS X install doesn’t like. There are some fixes for this which I need to look into.

The photos

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - The MacBook Mini Project

gRaphaël

So I had never heard of the Raphaël JavaScript library until today but it seems to be pretty cool and powerful when it comes to doing visual things. It also has a graphics library which seems to be perfect for what I need, but I have to look into it as it’s fairly undocumented.

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

Kilian’s ico

Made by my Dutch friend Kilian at Wakoopa, a fork of Alex Young’s ico, based on the RaphaelJS library. It’s almost as powerful as gRaphael but just as undocumented. Luckily I know the guy so i guess I can hunt him down for advise.

Flot

Flot is probably the best JQuery graphing plugin. It’s not as flashy as some of the others but definitely as functional. Plus it has the added benefit of being written as a JQuery plugin which makes it so much easier to fit in with existing code.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Cool Javascript Graphs

So a while ago I figured out how to use the 3G dongle without using the Three Mobile Manager software, but instead using the Mac OS X network manager. I decided to write it up now because I noticed a few more people with the same issues. This tutorial is based on a Mac Mini and Dell Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and 10.6.1.

Step 1: Install the Mobile Manager

We’re not going to use the Mobile Manager, but this is the easiest way to install the drivers for the dongle.

• Just stick in your dongle into your Mac and wait for the 3Connect disc to show up.
• Run the 3Connect Installer.app
• When the installer is done, ignore any “new network adapters found” for now.
• Instead go to your Applications folder, and trash the 3Connect folder

Your drivers have now been installed but your OS X doesn’t know what to do with the dongle yet.

Step 2: Setup your network preferences

• Go to the Network panel in your System Preferences
• You should have a HUAWEI Mobile device in the list on the left, if it is not unplug and plug in your dongle until it does
• Click Advanced, and in the modem pane set the details to:
  • Vendor: Generic
  • Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
  • APN: Three.co.uk
  • CID: 1
• Under DNS set the following two DNS servers:
  • 4.2.2.4
  • 4.2.2.3
• Then (I’m not sure if this is essential) go to the PPP tab:
  • Uncheck Send PPP echo packets
  • Check Use verbose logging
• Click OK to save your changes
• Finally, set the telephone number to *99#
• Hit Apply

Now when you hit Connect you should be able to connect to the network. Tick the Show modem status in menu bar to have a handy little menu in the menu bar that allows you to see how long you’ve been connected and much more.

Caveats

There are some downsides to this method. The main one being that you loose the ability to check how much data you’ve sent/received this month. I guess you can use My3 for that instead. You also lose the ability to sent SMS messages, which is why it might be wise to leave the 3 Mobile Manager in your applications if you ever use that function.

Finally I have to note that this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I used to run this same method under Leopard and it worked fine, it now works fine under Snow Leopard too, but any weird hardware or software upgrade might break it, I’m just not sure.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Easiest way to use a Three 3G Dongle on a Mac

In comes TwoUp, which gives you a few little keyboard shortcuts to move a window to take the left, right, top, or bottom half of the screen. It’s a free product and has become part of my every day use. I can’t live without it anymore on a big monitor.

Irradiated Software – TwoUp.

There is also a more advanced version called SizeUp that gives you more positions (quarters of the screen, multi monitor support) which is not free. It’s only $13 so I might be buying this soon to thank the guy who made both apps for his great work.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - AppDate #14: TwoUp

Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found. « Panic Blog.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For November 18th – December 4th

I found a good deal on eBay for a Dell Mini 10 with integrated wireless-n, bluetooth, 3G/HSDPA, TV-tuner, HD screen and a 6 cell battery. Additionally I liked the model because everyone seems to like the Dell Mini 10 for  turning them into hackintoshes. Yeah, that’s where I was wrong.

The Dell Mini 10 has a little brother called the Dell Mini 10v (where the v stands for value). This model rarely comes with all the extras and has a atom N series processor. It turns out that my machines Z-series atom is actually the reason why I can’t run Mac OS X on it. Doh!

Now I promised myself at the beginning of the year to invest some more time in Linux, so I saw this as a good moment to try it out. I started off with Ubuntu 9.10, which is the newest Ubuntu version. After install the wifi didn’t work, neither did the graphics driver, nor the brightness controls, nor the sleep/suspend, nor the wifi, etc. I spend a few hours getting the wifi and screen to work correctly, and a hack gave me hibernation support. But by then the audio started acting up even more so I decided to do the wise thing to switch to Ubuntu 9.04 (the current long-term-support release).

I chose for the Netbook Remix release because I already started to notice that having a UI that’s optimized for a small screen and a small keyboard might be a wise plan. I managed to get everything to work pretty quickly (except for the TV tuner software) but realized that even the netbook remix doesn’t really run that smoothly on my Z530 with 1GB of ram.

Now to be fair, I’m used to machines with 4GB of ram for the least 4 years, so this is quite a step back. But the screen tearing and slow response is just sometimes killing me. So I decided to look into upgrading the RAM in this machine. This is when I realized this machine doesn’t have any upgradable RAM!

So at the moment I’m really contemplating my options. I love the built-in 3G in this machine, and the 6 cell battery is interesting, but the keyboard is crap, the upgradability sucks, and it won’t run Mac OS X.

So, what IS the best netbook out there that can run Mac OS X? Should I stick with this machine for now or maybe go back to Mac? A Macbook Air is starting to look very tempting.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Dell Mini 10/Linux – 2 Days of pain

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Minemalistic TV Show Posters

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Prodigy Vs Enya – Smack My Bitch Up

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For October 7th – November 9th

It’s sad it’s over already but at least we still have the photos.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - BarCampLondon7 was awesome

I just love these guys

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?” Live Performance

In 2008 the Architecture faculty of my university (Delft University of Technology) burned down completely. Since then people have been proposing new buildings to take its place. I must say this design is quite impressive and rather awesome.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - The New Architecture

Great article by Dom on what to do when you start freelancing. I officially started fully freelancing today and I’m glad I started it on my own terms. I mostly agree with Dom: get out there and network or you’ll never get any clients.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - First Steps Into Freelancing

New box, and now you can upload full images for the back side too!

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Moo MiniCards just got some HUGE updates!

[Edit: I had to replace the video with an older one because the original one has been pulled. This one doesn't have lap dancers but it sets the scene quite right]

Bad Yahoo! Very bad!

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Taiwan ‘Hack Girls’

The theme also has some custom fonts and some CSS3 magic, which means the site is best viewed in Safari or Firefox on a Mac, but don’t be afraid, it also works in almost every other browser, including IE6.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - New blog theme!

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Ready to play in Black Dynamite

GoodReader PDF RefLow

GoodReader costs £0.59 and was already able to read really large PDFs with some neat tricks. Now, in version 2.3 they have added a lot more cool options. The coolest one I think is PDF Reflow which will reflow the text in a PDF to be larger and easier to read, without having to do a weird zoom around the page margins. The new version also supports USB file transfer (Mac only) to the iPhone and a load of other new features and optimisations.

Overall I’m extremely happy with this app and it’s one of the few apps for the iPhone that really show what good software engineering is all about. Get it now at discounted price (£0.59) in the App Store.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - GoodReader – Best PDF reader for iPhone

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For August 23rd – September 21st

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Video of the Day: Quarter Pounder with Cheese!

So, Starbucks Instant Coffee, sounds like a bad idea from the start right? That’s at least what I thought but I have to admit that this is probably the best instant coffee I’ve ever had. I mean, it’s no espresso or anything but it’s definitely better than any of the other instant coffee I’ve ever tasted. Traditionally instant coffee seems to be highly chemical stuff that looks more like dried up turd than actual ground coffee. Starbucks’ instant coffee on the other hand actually looks like a really fine blend of espresso coffee, and actually also smells like real coffee.

In the end the taste is still nothing compared to a good espresso machine, but admittedly most Starbucks customers (and this is even more valid for Brits) like to add loads of stuff like milk, sugar and vanilla to their coffee anyway. I’d say Starbucks VIA Ready Brew is a really good way to get some semi-decent coffee of you’re on the road, or on holiday, and it definitely beats most other instant coffees any day. Though, if you want some real coffee, make your way to a real Starbuck (expecting loads of slack from anti Starbucks pundits) or to any other decent coffee place in London.

Starbucks VIA Ready Brewis available in Starbucks stores all across the world and goes for about $10 per 12 sachets.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Review: Starbucks VIA Ready Brew

The reason for all the hype around this movie is because of the technologies used in this movie. The movie relies a lot on computer generated content and many of the characters are fully computer generated. On top of that the movie will be shown in (IMAX) 3D. Normally when a director makes a movie like this, he would not be able to see the full product until after the post production. In Cameron’s setup though, he was able to preview something that resembled the final product on a screen while shooting the real actors, and change anything he wanted.

Now, before I go on I want to point you at this trailer. Have a look at it and I’ll continue my rant afterward.

We saw a 3D version of some of the scenes that were in this trailer, and a few more. All and all it was quite impressive, and I can imagine really enjoying the experience in the IMAX, and I will probably do so in December.

I don’t think it lives up to the hype though. The acting (mainly Sam Wortington’s main character) is a bit mediocre, and the story line seems to be very predictable. I don’t necessarily want to say that we have seen this story line before in a movie, but anyone who has ever played a 3D shooter must feel like this is a cheap and predictable story line. Even worse is the fact that because the movie relies so much on CGI that it almost looks like a really long trailer or cutscene for the next FarCry.

The added idea of 3D projection doesn’t work for me necessarily either. It is cool in the slow scenes, but in any of the fast ones my eyes simply can’t keep up with the image. I’m not sure if that’s me because I wear glasses, or because I’m simply turning old, but it takes away from the experience. It also makes the movie feel more gimmicky that it needs to be.

I do have to say though that the 3D experience is a lot better than what I saw in Harry Potter 6 where it really felt like I was looking at one of those old ViewMasters. I will write an article soon on why I do think 3D is the future of cinema, but why it simply isn’t there yet.

The movie premieres in the UK on December 18th and I think I’ll probably go and see it in the IMAX within a week of release, simply because I am a sci-fi geek and I do like these kind of movies.

What do you think? Discussion in the comments.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Preview of James Cameron’s Avatar

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For August 10th – August 20th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - What do geeks do in the weekend? Swede!

Take Twitter for example, who fairly recently finally added oAuth to their product so that we now don’t have to give out our username and password to every funny little Twitter tool. Twitter’s implementation has no granularity in the oAuth authorisation which leads to people signing away full read/write permission to their account when they use their Twitter to log in to a game.

Yes, you read that right: developers use Twitter’s oAuth to let people authenticate themselves. It seems not everyone understand the difference between authentication and authorisation. This obviously leads to some developers abusing this new found power to do evil, much like the early Facebook App developers used the permissions they got from you to spam all your friends with invites to come and join that app you looked at once.

I agree that oAuth is a great technology, but inherently it’s going to get a bad name when companies like Twitter don’t implement it correctly. We could go and educate the user, but I think that’s an impossible undertaking that would better be avoided. oAuth (and actually OpenID similarly) faces a real problem when it comes to user experience that needs to be solved. I guess I’m not the first one talking about this but I’m wondering if there even is a solution.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Twitter and The Case Against oAuth

I know a lot of people have been going crazy about this little camera, but I never understood it until this weekend. To give you a bit of background: in the years I’ve played with a lot of cameras both professionally and personally. We had a Sony PD-150 (mini DV) at our company ED-ME in 2005, and I had a Sony HDD digital video camera in 2008. You would assume I would view the Flip as nothing but a toy, and have to admit I did up till now.

The Flip

So what is the Flip? It is a little video camera that you hold like you’d hold a cameraphone. It’s actually quite similar to cameraphone as it’s about the size of one (an old one) and as light. There is a big red button on the back for turning recording on/off , and a four-way control for some of the “advanced” videos. When you managed to record your video you just plug in the Flip into the USB port of your PC with the nice flip-out USB connector (hence the name).

If you are a Windows user, you’ll get a nice bit of software that’s actually loaded and run from the Flip itself. It allows you to quickly edit and share your videos to major video sites. If you are on a Mac you can use iMovie or any other bit of video editing software.

The great thing about the Flip is that the digital files that it records your video to are actually editable in most software packages without needing any conversion first, unlike the kind of files you get on most JVC or Sony HDD cameras. So over are the days of Mini DV to digital conversion, or trying to figure out what to do with that .mod file.

The Downsides

There are some downsides to the Flip too. First of there is no image stabilization in the camera, and add that to the very unstable way of holding the device it makes for pretty shaky video. Most people probably won’t notice, but some might. Add to that the fact that there is no way of extending the camera with other accessories like lenses or microphones and you have a very limited device. The internal Mic is great but very limited, and if you ever want to add a better microphone to your camera you’re stuck with getting a new camera.

But inherently that’s not what this camera is made for. This camera is made for people that want to have a quick record-edit-upload workflow at a great price.

Making sense of Flip Ultra vs Flip Mino

The guys from Pure Digital who make the Flip have 4 models of it in production. There is the 4GB Flip Ultra, 8GB Flip Ultra HD, 2GB Flip Mino, and the 4GB Flip Mino HD. It took me a while to figure out what the differences are, but I figured it out. The difference between the Flip Mini and Flip Ultra is the form factor. The Mino is smaller and lighter and therefore can hold less capacity than the Flip Ultra. The Flip Ultra is also designable.

The biggest difference though is that because the Mino is smaller, it can only hold half the amount of video (60 minutes) as its bigger brother. Both the Mini and Ultra come in a larger capacity High Definition version which has the same form factor and video capacity as the normal versions (60 mins for the Mino, 120 minutes for the Ultra).

Where to buy?

I almost forgot! The best thing of the Flip is the price. The simplest model is about £95, the Mino HD is about £150 RRP. All and all a lot cheaper and easier than most other cameras.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Gadget Review: Flip Ultra

The main reason for The City to be this pricey probably has a lot to do with the amount of wood that has gone into this game design. The normal game only has 24 little wooden meeples, but this version comes with an additional bag of wooden “wall” pieces. This gives the game a great haptic improvement over the original game, but obviously at a price.

The City can be played with 2 to 4 players, but I think 3 is probably the best. Make sure you play with people who’ve played Carcassonne before though, as this definitely seems to be a more advanced version of the regular game. The added dimension of walls and the point scoring and option limiting factors that are involved with it can be a bit overwhelming to new players.

Overall I have to say I like the game and I’m glad I managed to get it for cheap on eBay. I’m not sure if it’s worth spending £30+ on, but if you’re a Carcassonne junky or you bump into a cheap deal make sure you get your hands on it.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Board Game Madness: Carcassonne – The City

Discussion in the comments.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My First Web App: Plain or Framework?

As you can see, Choosy is a handy little tool for us that have more than one main browser, are web developers, have site specific browsers, or have any other need of forcing a link to open in a very specific browser. The app is very customizable when it comes to its behavior, which makes it even cooler. It only costs $12, which I think is a bargain, but you can also try it out for a demo period if you want.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Appdate #13: Choosy

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For August 5th – August 10th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For July 25th – August 4th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For July 16th – July 23rd

Here they are. Most of them come from Dan W’s Tumblr which has a lot more, but some of them were my own finds.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Data Visualisation @ News Innovation London

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For July 13th – July 15th

Some of the cool hacks

There was an amazing amount of hacks put together over the weekend, leading to a presentation session of well over 2 hours. A full list can be found on the Music Hack Day wiki but I handpicked a few that I really liked.

Percussion machine by @alistair

Alistair and Mr Duck set off to make something pretty crazy and play with Arduino boards and servos. They created a percussion machine that made most of us laugh.

Music Bore

I’d like to describe Music Bore as the death to Radio DJ. Powered by IRC and Mac OS X’s text to speech API they created a DJ like experience.

Lonely Harps

The dating website Lonely Harps helps you find potential partners based on matching Last.FM profiles.

Last.FM events on iPhone

Handy little iPhone app that gives you a map with all the upcoming Last.FM events in your area. Very handy if you’re stuck ina  foreign city looking for a party.

My hack

My hack was really simple. I had the idea to map song lyrics onto locations around the world per decade, but discovered most lyrics actually don’t have that many place names in them. Instead I decided to go along the same route and explore other ways of visualisation musical culture shifts.

I decided to go for analysing the lyrics of the top 10 songs per decade an give them multiple visualisations. I only ended up doing a Wordle visualisation in the end, but I think it’s pretty cool. Go ahead and have a look at http://zeitgeist.cristianobetta.com/ and have a look at the different decades.

The hard part of this little app wasn’t actually the visualisation, but actually getting a top 10 list of UK songs per era. There is simply no API for it so I had to opt to make my own API (JSON) for the EveryHit site. For now it’s just JSON and only the cumulative decades (not the single years), but if anyone’s interesting I might write the rest too and maybe add a SPARQL layer too.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Music Hack Day 2009

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For June 25th – July 11th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For June 18th – June 25th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For June 13th – June 17th

But using a shared hosting service can sometimes be a pain. Yesterday I wanted to install Bugzilla on Site5 and couldn’t initially figure it out. The wiki and forums were not of much help and most of the Google search results pointed me in the wrong direction.

Eventually I did figure it out though with the help of some bloggers.

The trick is to start of with the instructions by kmcital in his blog post. He runs you through most of the steps which are pretty strait forward. Halfway though he advises you to mail the lunar pages support, but instead I just opened a ticket on the Site5 backpanel and requested the modules I needed. I got reply within minutes which proves that Site5 is awesome.

Then I followed the rest of the instructions and ended up with a big 403 Forbidden page. I did a quick Google search and discovered that this is easily solved by either setting the right ‘$webservergroup’ in your localconfig file, or alternatively by manually setting some access permissions correctly as described in this post.

I hope this helps some of you, as it sure would have helped me.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - How to install Bugzilla on Shared Hosting (Site5)

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For May 28th – June 10th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For May 14th – May 18th

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Bookmarks For May 11th – May 14th

For those who don’t get the joke regarding GeoCities: read and shiver.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Should I Backup My… – The Video