Monthly Archives: June 2011

The Inklein Quartet

Posted on by
Reply

The Inklein Quartet. Inclined to make good music (see what I did there). Pic from Myspace.

Sometimes there are lucky coincidences. Even in recession battered England. Because by pure chance I stumbled over the name of the composer, conductor and all around good guy Steve Bentley-Klein and soon found out that he had made an album. With a string quartet. And drums! The Inklein Quartet (It’s a pun on words, you know) was (according to the blurb on the net) founded in 2000 and has been working with all sorts of fancy names: The Royal National Theatre, Morcheeba, the British Council (unfortunately not the Style Council) and was even on some pretty cool movies. They released one album, which I am currently listening to, and it’s bloody beautiful (available via Amazon Download). It’s a lovely mix between late  – romantic string quartet, trip hop, gypsy jazz and features some of the nicest music I have heard for a while.

Their website is now defunct, but have a listen to their stuff on their myspace page.

 

Geekiness aplenty.

Posted on by
Reply

A cooler monster

This picture was taken by the best girlfriend ever after wandering randomly into my study and seeing this enormous red, glowing thing on my (messy) desk. She obviously asked herself what in the world that thing would be: a Dr Whoish weapon? An alien artifact? Nope. It’s actually a fancy CPU cooler called the ‘Silent Knight’ and now sits on my new processor.

I had recently acquired ‘Ghostbusters – The Game’ and was quite confident that my moderate gaming rig would be happy to cope with it, but was let down badly. 4 gb, a HD5670 and a Phenom X III obviously don’t get you very far anymore, so I had to upgrade. As I have lost the will to scour hardware sites and compare prices, I went for a moderately priced MoBo/Processor/Ram/Cooler bundle from a very friendly chap at Maplins in Colchester and a HD 6850 that I sourced from the brillant Nexus Computer in the same Essex metropolis (a true geek haven, with knowledgeable, friendly staff). Together with 8 gigs of ram and a fresh Windows 7 installation, this is now an impressively quick rig for under 400 quid (and still implanted in my ancient beige metal case from the late 20th century), and the Ghostbusters are having a very impressive blast.

And yes, the silent knight fitted into the old metal case with ease and now keeps the little monster at a breezy 40 celsius, even when Ray,Peter and Egon are at it against dozens of ghosts.

 

Avoiding the Itunes shuffle bias

Posted on by
Reply

At this present time I have 4276 tracks in my Itunes collection. I carry these around on various portable item (ipad/ipod/Archos) but for some reason the shuffle function on my ipad/ipod/macbook only seem to serve the same 10 percent songs, so I have started to listen to my collection from A to Z. This is incredibly liberating and I have rediscovered the majority of the tracks that I had completely forgotten about (I completely forgot about my Miles Davis collection). It also tends to serve a very varied program, and keeps my afternoons at work much more interesting.

The only thing I want to know whether Apple benefits from pushing only a handful of songs. Do I smell a conspiracy?