A few months ago I received an email with a great selection of striking public service announcements — or “adverts”, as they were mislabelled.
The one below struck a particular chord of ironic familiarity.
Having also discovered a very capable tool named “LightBox Video Web Gallery Creator” and after supplementing the original contributions with a few more controversial and topical ones, here then is a page of the most powerful non-ads for your guilty enjoyment.
The other day I was checking up on car maker Mercedes-Benz‘s contribution to the world of music. It was then that I happened across the debut EP of one Zoe.LeelA via the rec72 netlabel and decided to download it. It’s free, of course.
As an unwritten rule, netlabel archives/releases will — over and above the audio files — sometimes include a playlist, typically some so-called cover art, and occasionally even miscellaneous texts and articles about the artist or album, or scans of newspaper cuttings.
Zoe.LeelA’s “Queendom Come“, for instance, went all out and included PDF documents and an extensive set of high-res, print-quality press kit photos — such as the one below.
Again, nothing unusual about that; the girl’s just trying to promote herself and her music.
Having been mildly intrigued by her 2009 album, I decided to grab her latest single from the same source. It, too included a wealth of promotional material and updated newsletters from 2010.
In the opinion of this author, mankind’s greatest achievement is the written word.
And in its most basic 7-bit ASCII form, the written word is nothing less than a device-independent treasure, irrespective of how dated opinions are or how incorrect predictions turned out to be. With the subject matter as diverse as the authors themselves, the archives now host a small library of text files collected primarily during the 1990’s — and a little beyond.
If you lived in South Africa during the eighties or nineties and used your modem to dial into services beyond Beltel, then you surely would have heard of or used Roblist.
Roblist was the de facto BBS list for South Africa, maintained by avid user Rob Fisher.
If you were a SysOp, you wanted your BBS to be on Roblist.
In 2002 I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time on my hands.
Since idle hands are said to be the devil’s playground, I figured this was as good a time as any to develop my very first proper web site. The HMVHumourList on the Web was launched in late 2002 as a simple, hand-created HTML version of the current incarnation of the joke mailing list I maintained. In time, the site grew beyond its hosting limitations, and I grew bored of it as interests moved elsewhere.
By the middle of 2008 the email format was abandoned in favour of a Google Group.
Interests having now settled to what was envisaged over a decade ago, that site as well as its own originators have been laid to rest in all their buggy glory:
Sure, in the grand scheme of things they’re just a bunch of jokes.
On the surface, it’s merely a sizeable collection of funnies — I will grant you that. And once you delve deeper into the annals of these shitty old jokes you will discover that many of them ain’t funny no more because, well, they’re old. Some have been re-told a million times.
Worse still is that most are dated to the extent that much of today’s audience won’t be able to grasp their relevance and context. They won’t always “get” it. Today’s readership won’t necessarily understand the situations described, the circumstances these progenitors find themselves in, or the geopolitical environment of the protagonist — let alone the technological status of the period.
There was a time when Michael Jackson was known primarily as a freaky sexual predator and therefore joined the Catholic Church as the butt of many jokes. When the Pentium FDIV bug was relevant, “Android” didn’t refer to a phone OS but a role that made the current governor of California a major movie star. This was the time before smartphones, iPods, and near-universal broadband internet access, and before everyone and their cat was on Facebook and/or Twitter.
From blogger.com to here. This is it. You’re looking at it.
Welcome to a changed layout on a different platform at a new address of the blog currently titled Gener@tion X.
Expect more of the same irreverent wit and wisdom, more lore and history, scathing criticism and brilliant insight, and provocative opinions sprinkled with utter tripe. Expect more content. Lots more. More of the same, and much more of the other.
Keeping in tune with the previous posting, we may as well follow up with the announcement that the Walkman has officially ejected its last tape.
After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player.
The company announced on Monday that it has ceased production of the classic, cassette tape Walkman in Japan, effectively sounding the death knell of the once iconic, now obsolete device and marking the end of one of the most successful consumer gadgets of all time.
Yes, they were actually still being manufactured until as recently as April 2010!
Like most connected people in the 21st century, I’ve accumulated a plentitude of MP3 audio/music files. Like many modern people in the western world, I’ve ripped most of my CD collection to MP3 music files, and like many other people I’ve also converted my old cassette collection to MP3 audio files.
Like a luddite audiophile, however, I’ve not switched to this so-called digital camp.
Despite the ubiquity of digital audio files (in whatever format) and the devil’s walkman (iPod), MP3 files are by no means my preferred means of listening to music. Still, they are kinda cool, convenient, useful, comparatively small, and portable.
As a result I’ve accumulated a fair share since I started collecting them (as far as that’s even possible) in earnest after I decided to rip all my CDs during several boring weeks of being holed up in an apartment in 2001. Before long, I got broadband, discovered P2P and even managed to fill a few gaps (yes, I’ve been a naughty boy). Still, most sound like crap and all it’s done is make me go out and buy more CDs.
But on a positive note, a great feature of MP3 files is their ability to store additional metadata (ID3 tags) such as song and artist name, album title and track number, genres, and even “artwork”. Researching those missing and incorrect ones proved to be quite the challenge in the early days, and it was this how I happened across and eventually got involved with Discogs. It is the information within the ID3 tags alone that turns the MP3 format from background noise into a powerful and informative tool. Usefulness is key.
And throughout, Winamp has been (since version 1.x) the default player of choice. It was quick, simple, free, allowed editing of ID3 tags, and supported just about any audio format thrown at it — including MIDi and MODule files (from the BBS days) as well as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats (although initially only via plugins).
All in all, Winamp did and still does what I need it to do.
In fact, as I write this, it’s playing a mix.
Yes, a mix. All the MP3 stuff that’s been collecting on my hard drives as of late consists of either DJ mixes or other free downloadable material by netlabels, or mashups, promos and freebies by aspiring or independent artists, or my own CD/tape/vinyl rips. There is so much out there — all for free and perfectly legal.
Digital media has arrived, and I suppose it’s here to stay for a while.
But how does one effectively maintain a growing collection of MP3 files, one that, as the owner’s tastes and interests change, becomes increasingly unclear and unwieldy? How does one keep track of everything?
In the beginning it was easy to keep an overview of a hard drive with a batch of songs on it: Windows’ own old file manager in conjunction with a great indexing utility called Everything and Winamp (now matured to version 5) and my own stringent tagging standards and sorting methods ensured that I always know where my shit is. No duplicates, no problem — notwithstanding that there were a lot less files to worry about.
As for playing entire directories or MP3 CD-ROMs, it’s the outstanding 1by1 Directory Player that has earned itself a permanent place in the regular arsenal.
So what’s missing, I hear you ask? What’s the point of this blog entry?
Well, if you’re looking for a “professional” review of software-based music players, look no further than this good and informative article at anythingbutipod.com.
