Fresh-Out-the-Box!

Some Radio to Listen January 31, 2006

3

And I Just Can’t Live Without My Radio

A list of some of my favourite listening places around the net.

Etherbeat Radio1– heard about this from one of the Afrobass DJs a while back. Quality site with a solid stream of bangers.

Mr. Scruff & Treva Whatever’s weekly Hotpot radio2 is archived and streamed on Japan’sSamurai.fm3. Samurai’s worth checking out for the multitude of other artists’ shows4 they host as well.

Brighton has it’s own underground Radio4A5 which has some great shows.

Canada’s WEFUNK Radio6 plays a great mix of new and old funk, jazz, hip-hop and breaks. Broadcast weekly.

The BBC has a lot of good stuff if you dig a bit deeper than the daytime drivel. 2 good places to look are the Radio 6 Mix page7 and the Essential Mix8 page on Radio 19‘s site.

Danzclub10 out of Spain play an eclectic mix of Nu Soul & Jazz, Hip-Hop, Beats, and classic Soul, Jazz & O.G. Breaks.

FFS (Funky French Society Radio 1) is a 24/7 streaming radio station out of France, playing Funk, Reggae, Soul and all good things. Well worth a listen…
The best player to use for listening to most of these on your PC is Winamp. It’s free and available here11.

If you need a player for Real Audio, use the underground Real Alternative12 instead of the poper Real player junk which scatters itself across your computer and is generally rude and obnoxious.

Recycled Cork Furniture January 23, 2006

http://www.danielmichalik.com/

Digital DJs ‘unaware of copy law’ January 13, 2006

I’d love to know how many licenses they’ve sold…
BBC News: Digital DJs ‘unaware of copy law’

Les Arcs Weather & Webcams January 11, 2006

Weather

Official Les Arcs website’s Ski Conditions page
Basic info from the BBC website’s Les Arcs page.
Good overview from Holiday Weather
Some good (if unorganised) reports from real people on Natives.
3 Day forecasts & resort info from Snow Forecast.
Meteo France’s Les Arcs 4 day forecast page.

Webcams
Links here soon…

Simple Explanation of Hard Drive Cache January 10, 2006

You sit down at the table for dinner. Your role is the CPU, the food is the data, The CPU cache is the spoon and fork, the RAM is your plate and bowl, the hard drive cache is the serving bowls on the table, and the hard drive platters are the pots and pans on the stove across the room. Now you have someone (Read Ahead) there which will refill the bowls on the tables as they get close to being empty.

So you are really hungry, but you cannot start chewing until you have a full mouth, so you put the food on the spoon in your mouth, but since it is a small spoon it is not a mouth full so the spoon has to go get some more from the plate and back to your mouth a couple times before you can start processing. Well if you have a bigger spoon then you can start chewing sooner. Of course with a bigger spoon the plate gets empty faster and you have to stop and refill it from the bowl. So you get a bigger plate, but this causes the serving bowl to get empty faster, and even though you tell the guy filling the bowl to bring more before you run out, he only works at one speed and nothing you do, short of replacing him with a top of the line olympic sprinter which you cannot afford, can make him go faster. So you get a much bigger serving bowl so that his speed at filling it ahead of time is no longer as much of a problem.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System January 4, 2006

More a presentation slideshow than a photo slideshow as I first presumed, but looks like it’s not far off being a Powerpoint beater.
It’s simple to use, elegant and well featured.
Add the fact that it’s standards compliant and XHTML/CSS/JS driven and I think it’ll be worth arguing the point of using it for clients.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

I guess the next stage in the progression will be an authoring tool for the content layer that’s a piece of piss to use, so all that’s needed is a good template design and clients can get on with the content creation themselves.