One of the advantages of being a bedroom DJ is only releasing sets when I am truly happy with them. Phoenix Sessions, my latest series, is an attempt to redefine some of the sounds I am using and mixing styles. Of course, you’ll still find some booty shakin’, head noddin’ tracks in here, but the first half in particular explores some downtempo and progressive breaks.

1. Sleepless Nights - 120 Days
2. Best Mamgu Ever - Underworld
3. No More, Anymore (Elusive Mix) - Matthew Adams
4. Human - James Zabiela
5. The White Flash (Ft. Thom Yorke) - Modeselektor
6. Gridlock (Digweed & Muirs Stripped Down Mix) - John Digweed
7. Smoke (Dark Globes Angel Of The North Remix) - Trafik
8. Moods Feat. Lemon (Valentino Kanzyani Remix) - Shlomi Aber
9. Whatever This May Be (Ogi Gee Cash & Synchronized Remix) - Luke Star, Yves Eaux & Leron
10. Beta Receptor (M.I.K.E.`s Undergroove Remix) - The Delta Rock Duo
11. Royal Gregory - Holy Fuck
12. Lumberjack - Kris Menace & Alan Braxe
13. Sunset Boulevard - Paul Keeley

 

 phoenix sessions 001 [77:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On the weekend, I did something semi-unusual: I installed a major new operating system on the day of it’s release. This is only semi-unusual because my hesitation only applies to Microsoft operating systems. On Linux, I’d install the latest and greatest of everything, and then potentially spend a few hours cleaning up the mess I’d made (remember, the purpose was to play, not get any work done).

In any case, Leopard Day arrived and I happily set about installing it on my Macbook Pro after making a full system backup on my new Seagate FreeAgent Go external drive. I’d be interested to see a correlation between external hard drive sales and the release of Leopard, as I’m fairly certain you’d see a fairly hefty spike. As an aside, the FreeAgent is a nice little drive that satisfies my major requirements: lightweight, and bus powered (meaning it doesn’t need an external power supply). It’s not overwhelmingly fast (it took about 3 hours for SuperDuper! to archive my 70gigs of data), but once Time Machine gets running I don’t notice it at all.

It’s taken a few days to get fully comfortable with Leopard. I have run across a few annoyances (and bugs) but the good definitely outweighs the bad.

Without further padding the content of this post, here’s a collection of thoughts and tweaks related to Leopard that you might find interesting:

• The Address Book no longer has support for Bluetooth devices. This is disappointing, but Blue Phone Elite looks like a good replacement for that functionality, as well as what Proximity provides.
• On a related note, Proximity seems to work just fine, as does everything else in my Calendar Synchronization post (excepting, of course, the Address Book SMS stuff).
• Quicksilver was picking up the backup copies of my applications from the Time Machine drive. To disable this, in Quicksilver select Catalog / Applications and de-select “Find All Applications”
• Spotlight was finding stuff on my Time Machine drive as well. I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, as the drive wasn’t empty when I initially plugged it in, and various posts in the Apple discussion groups seem to indicate it’s not a common problem. Solved by adding the Time Machine backup directory to Spotlight’s Privacy page.
• Spaces is great, but I wish it were a little more configurable. I run a multi-monitor setup most of the time (laptop sits open to one side of an external monitor). What I would really like is to have separate “spaces” for each monitor. Unfortunately, Spaces sees the two monitors as one large workspace, and switching to a new space swaps both. I would prefer to have Mail, iCal and iTunes open on the laptop monitor at all times, but setting those apps to “All Spaces” makes a big mess when I disconnect the laptop and run as a single screen.
• Spaces seems to have several bugs related to switching applications. In truth, I don’t know if these are bugs in the apps or in Spaces, but certain apps don’t behave themselves very well. For example, Cmd-Tabbing to Firefox will send me back to the correct Space but not activate Firefox. Adium doesn’t seem to respect the “All Spaces” command very well. And Photoshop CS3 has trouble with it’s fading UI elements when you activate it from another Space. None of these are show-stoppers, but hopefully they will get resolved fairly soon.
• The FreeAgent Go comes with a double-headed USB connector - one for data, and one for power. Turns out, you only need the data plug connected on the Macbook Pro. This is nice, as the MBP only has 2 USB ports and they are on opposite sides of the machine. The additional power connector is, allegedly, only required for certain laptops that don’t provide enough power over a single port. Fair enough, but the MBP does so you can forgo plugging them both in.
• I’ve had a few power-related issues since the update. Once, the system crashed when waking from sleep. On another occasion, the system refused to power down. Finder stopped, but the OS hung showing nothing but desktop. I have a suspicion this is related to Bluetooth devices (doh!). I’ve also had a few occasions where, when reconnecting the external monitor, I log in and the system immediately goes to sleep. I can wake it and log in immediately with no harm, but it’s still odd. I’m considering resetting the system manager to see if that clears things up.

On the day after Apple announced a record quarter, John Gruber runs down a list of possible reasons why people are switching to the Mac. I’m not going to argue with any of his statements — for the most part, I think he’s dead on. But I’d like to add one of my own, based on my personal experience of switching from the PC to the Mac.

I’ve always been a PC user, at least since our first 386SX-16 that my Dad bought for us when I was in high school. Before that, I used Apple IIs at school and spend many a day playing Pools of Radiance and coding text adventures on my Commodore 64. I had certainly played with Macs, but they always seemed foreign and inaccessible to me. I can vividly remember commenting to a friend (in the days of Windows 3.1) that using a Mac made me feel like I was trapped in Windows and couldn’t get out of it. Keep in mind, I also had about 4 different versions of my autoexec.bat and config.sys files that could be swapped in depending on the memory requirements of the program (or, more likely) game I wanted to run.

In any case, I pretty much lived and breathed PCs from DOS 4.2 through to Windows XP, and made my living developing web and Flash applications on a variety of PC hardware. In the meantime, I also ran Red Hat Linux on an old Pentium 100 (complete with F00F bug) that served as my router in the pre-LinkSys NAT box days, and even dabbled with a Debian (unstable) KDE desktop for about 9 months — although frequent reboots to Windows (or sluggish sessions in VMWare) to use Photoshop made it impossible to give up on Windows completely. All the while, I followed the progress of OS X from a distance, happily digesting Ars Technica’s in-depth reviews of the OS on every release from pre-beta through to Tiger. I’m a curious fellow that way.

For me, using a computer has only partially been about the tools that it provides. It’s also about playing. I love to install things, mess around with servers and settings, just to see if I can get it to work. It’s the same reason I bought a PSP — because it was hackable. I could make it do fun and interesting things. I could play with it, not just on it.

Right now, it’s the Mac that embodies this sense of play the best for me in the computer world. Linux was fun for a while, but it lacked the professional tools I needed to do my job. And it lacks the completeness that Apple provides, each service integrated with the other in a way that makes you want to connect the widgets to the doodads, and watch them play together.

This sense of play extends beyond the OS services and bundled applications. A system like Quicksilver could never exist on Windows or Linux, as much because of the APIs exposed through AppleScript as because of the giddy sense of discoverability built into the application by someone that clearly cares dearly for the Apple ecosystem. (It’s funny to write that about Quicksilver, an app I once described to a fellow Unix-head as “like a pipe for GUIs”).

The Mac opened up a whole new world for me to play in, and the rabbit hole runs pretty deep. For me, Vista was the final straw — not only did it not provide anything new and fun to play with, it made everything my PC used to do seems horrifically slow. It lasted a few months, and then I switched.

Because if it’s not play, it’s just work.

A few days ago I posted about using Spanning Sync and Proximity to synchronize iCal, Google Calendar and my cell phone (a k790, although any phone supported by iSync should work).

It turns out there is a free alternative to Spanning Sync called GCALDaemon, which is a bit more work to get running but a decent alternative if you don’t want to pay for Spanning Sync.

Read the rest of this post… »

There was a time when I could keep my entire schedule in my head. Years of university test times and due dates were dutifully tracked by my brain. In the intervening years, however, I seem to have killed most of my long and short term memory with booze — or maybe I’m just a whole lot busier.

In any case, I’ve been facing an increased sense of panic every time I try to book an appointment. What if I have a conflict? Krista keeps her entire life in the pages of a daily calendar, so I’ve attempted to follow suit, digital style.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried, but every previous attempt failed for one reason or another:

• Google Calendar: I love having my schedule available from pretty much any machine with an internet connection, but launching it seems horribly slow and the whole experience is oddly divorced from everything else on my Mac. I could write a whole other post (and maybe I will) about my migration from Windows native apps to Web Applications, and back to native Mac apps. I think it says a lot about how good OS X’s integrated tools are, though, that I’ve taken that path.
• iCal: really, a beautiful calendar, but I missed the “everywhere-ness” of Google Calendar. I can do a one-way sync from Google to iCal using iCal’s Subscriptions, but anything I add to my local calendar won’t get reflected back. This is critical, as I’d like to be able to check the calendar from any other machine, including my cell.
• Sony Ericsson k790’s built-in Calendar application: a surprisingly full-featured little calendar tool. For my process to work, I need to be able to quickly add events on the go. iSync takes care of synchronizing iCal and the k790, but I’m too forgetful (and lazy) to sync it myself whenever changes are made.

I love shopping in the US.

I like to visit California — my sister lives in SF, the weather is always great, and there’s always a chance you’ll see someone famous. Our recent vacation along the Pacific Coast Highway was no exception. Just outside Santa Barbara, in a nice campsite across from El Capitano, I saw a celebrity.

The skateboarding dog from the iPhone commercials. On his skateboard. Slobbering heavily and clearly having the time of his life.

It was awesome.

On certain models, mainly MacBook Pros, this seems to be the case. I’ve been having trouble staying online recently, mostly on my home network. Connections are maintained, but it’s increasingly hard to create new ones. DNS lookups can be painfully slow, and Google Talk conversation (through Adium) die midstream, with nary an error message in sight. My problems date to around the time of the 10.4.10 Update, although they’ve been getting much worse in the past week as I spend more time on my home WiFi connection. Some users are reporting frequent kernel panics, others are having stability if outlet power is used instead of battery. In my case, it’s just very frequent poor connectivity.

I’ve just installed the fix recommended by user IamNobody in the Apple forums. Let’s hope it works. Look for the post dated Jun 30, 2007 5:01 AM.

Update: looks like I’m late to the party. Apple released a fix within minutes of this post. Yay?

One of my favourite ways to get introduced to new music, and to introduce others, is through a simple game called “revolving DJ”. It can be played at parties, in your office, or anywhere you can hook an iPod up to a set of speakers. The rules are simple: each participant plays a 3 song set in turn until the party ends and everyone goes home. By trying to choose music you think everyone else will enjoy, or is unfamiliar with, you pick up all kinds of new influences.

It was during a lazy Friday afternoon of Revolving DJ and beer than an idea was sparked in my head, regarding the iPhone and the lack of 3rd party native applications. It doesn’t take too many songs before you long for a method to effortlessly transfer tracks directly from one iPod to the next. A few moments later, someone will inevitably realize “hmmm, the Zune could actually do that“. Unfortunately, it’s implementation was so hopelessly crippled by the marketdroids and RIAA-fearing managers at Microsoft that the device was essentially stillborn.

Apple has also built an iPod with WiFi — it’s called the iPhone, and while most people are rightfully focusing on the new features of the device (phone, web browser, email client), it’s also considered one of the best iPods ever built (ignoring the anemic storage for now). The device runs a version of OS X, meaning the only preventing a mobile p2p application that can share music with friends or strangers is a smart programmer and a way to load the application onto the iPhone — conveniently left out. The Zune crippled it’s WiFi in firmware, but an open SDK on the iPhone would mean anyone could easily install such an app on their phone. Even better, if you didn’t already have the p2p app, you could easily jump on the web and download it the moment you needed it. It’s the viral-social, the dream application for music-heads everywhere, and Apple can’t stop it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is pretty much what they did by not shipping an SDK for the phone.

I suspect that for most fans of electronic music, there was a trigger song, band or album. It’s not like you hear this stuff on the radio — certainly not where I grew up in Calgary. College radio played hard-core techno on Friday nights, but to me it was (and remains) totally inaccessible.

My song was Orbital’s “Halcyon + On + On” from the Hackers soundtrack (at least, that’s where I heard it). I’d listened to a bit of other stuff, but that track blew my mind. I promptly went out and bought In Sides, and never looked back. Over the years, I collected every other Orbital album as well. Long before I dreamt of being a DJ, I imagined building new sounds out of “I Wish I Had a Duck”, from Snivilization. Layer upon layer of electro-squish and samples, Orbital created an imaginary world in the confines of that song.

Years later, I found myself searching for an opening track to complement Layo & Bushwacka!’s brilliant “Saudade”, and I reached for “I Wish I Had a Duck”. Orbital’s best work still resonates, and in a way this mix brings me full circle.

Sidenote: if you’re an Orbital fan, be sure to check out Paul Hartnoll’s solo album, “Ideal Condition”. Justifiably moving away from the core Orbital sound, he manages to find some brilliance in cinematic work and pop collaborations.

Tracklist:

1. I Wish I Had A Duck - Orbital
2. Saudade (Remix) - Layo & Bushwacka!
3. Rej (A Hundred Birds Remix) - Ame
4. When I Listen 2 This Sound, feat. ZM (Alex Celler Mix) - Nikola Gala
5. Builder (Kris Menace Re-Edit) - Eva
6. Anime (Sequential Remix) - Hernan Cattaneo, John Tonks
7. North American Scum (Kris Menace Remix) - LCD Soundsystem
8. Affectation (Dousk Dub Electro) - Chris Nemmo & Andree Eskay
9. One & Only - Jimmy van M & Nick Warren
10. Tornado - Habersham
11. Discopolis (A Hundred Birds Remix) - Lifelike & Kris Menace
12. Tease - James Harcourt
13. One Day (Spiritchaser Terrace Mix) - The Craftsmen

 

 Standard Podcast [77:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download