Author Archives: Fordiebianco

New Soul that you can listen to without wanting to strangle a chicken.

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I love Black Music with all its sub genres (and occasionally black music played by white people. sometimes it works). Whether it’s Robert Johnson’s 1936 blues recordings, Duke Ellington 1940’s big band sound, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis in the 50’s, Coltrane and Motown in the 60’s, Disco and Funk in the 70’s, Rap and Soul and early House from the 80’s, Acid Jazz  from the 90’s, English Soul from the Naughties, I love it all. My iTunes collection is steadily growing and the best girlfriend ever is starting to complain about the lack of space for our CDs and Vinyl in the living room. But most of the stuff that’s been added is more than ten years old, with contemporary soul featuring less and less. My main problem is the stuff that’s being played on mainstream radio: whether it’s Rihanna, M.I.A., Jessy J, Blackeyed Peas and of course Cowell’s neverending succession of karaoke artists who garble and mangle either classic tunes or ‘songs’ composed and produced by a collective of contemporary producers, always heavily auto-tuned. I wanted to smash more than one radio after being exposed to this merciless, cynical crap, but I am sure my coworkers would complain.

If that makes me sound like an old and bitter man, so be it. To some extend, I am (at leaast when it comes to music).

So, recently I have started buying new music that was suggested from friends and stuff I heard on Solar Radio and Jazz Fm, and thankfully I wasn’t disappointed. There is still some stuff out there that is handmade, well produced, free of auto tune, free of 120bpm ambient beats and just plain amazing. So, let me introduce you to some new faves.

Reel People: amazing London soul/acid jazz outfit. Great live band as well

If you like your music sounding like an eighties club track, then Cool Million is your thing. A decidedly uncool Danish/German duo, they nevertheless manage to get those creky old hips swinging.

Joey Negro and the Sunburst do what I would describe as ‘Soulful House’. Very listenable and great for the jogging track. He remixed ‘Half a minute’ by Matt Bianco, so he must be good.

Richard Earnshaw’s latest album is absolutely amazing, and the fact that he is featuring the lovely Jocelyn Brown makes it even better.

And then there’s The Rebirth. Slightl strange (well, they are Americans), but what a great album. Me thinks they call it ‘NuJazz’. So there.

It’s only Windows, but what can you do

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I have what you would call a heterogenous network at home: there are two Apple laptops, an AppleTV, one Windows gaming rig, a few Linux based Wifi-radios, a RaspberryPi, an OpenBSD server, a Wii and an Apple Yimecapsule. All are living in perfect harmony, just like ebony and ivory, on my keyboard. Nothing ever breaks, stops suddenly working or behaves weirdly. Everything but the Windows machine. Now I don’t want to say that I am not happy with Windows 7. Compared to XP 7 is a wonderful OS, where everything always works and the GUI is (almost) fun. The games available via Steam are brillant, and AMD’s hardware makes the whole thing a delight to use.

But.

Every so often (every 6 months?) Windows decides to stop playing ball. A boot might not be successful, the registry starts making funny noises, the control panel might not respond, etc. ‘Virus’ you might suggest. My idea exactly, but Mr Kaspersky is keeping a pretty good watch, the machine is being scanned, and I don’t venture on ‘those’ websites. Nope, it’s just Windows that decides to break down after a certain number of months. How many times  I had to reinstall the bloody thing I don’t know, but it’s certainly nothing I have ever had to do with OsX. So today I am sitting again in fron of the bloody screens, armed with numerous DVDs and have to wait until all the drivers, utilities and  games have downloaded. And all that on a rural broadband connection.

Time to play the bass and listen to some music.

The Open University provideth

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There are not many Brits I revere more than Michael Young. Well, maybe the two Matt Biancos, but that’s a different kettle of fish, as they weren’t responsible for the founding of the Consumers’ Assocation (these days ‘Which’) or the Open University. I have been a devoted OU student for many years now, and I will hopefully be for another few. This year my third alma mater sent me to Bath University to participate in my course’s summer residential school. A full week of lectures and experimental work they do stretch their days quite long: you start at 9 and finish at 21:00. And then they expect you to take part in fun and shenanigans until midnight. How the course staff manages this for 4 full weeks I have no idea, as I am already knackered after day one. To get to Bath, these days one has to drive through 4 hours of torrential rain (if I ever meet a climate change denier I will make him walk through one of these floods and then let him explain to me why we suddenly have Monsoon rain in the UK).

Bath University itsself has all the charms of Basildon before it was beautified…


But this is nothing compared to their undergraduate accomodation:

My first impression was ‘solitary imprisonment in high security location’ but apparently this is standard accomodation for undergraduates around here. Oh dear. Anyway, it looks like I’m not going to spend a lot of time in there (communal showers with the other lads, btw. I feel like I have been inserted into a mid eighties American teenage comedy. Or a Kim Stanley Robinson novel.  Next thing there will be towel fights).

Tutorial staff is excellent and highly motivated (certainly a difference to my first Uni) and my fellow students are all as keen as a bunch of Labrador puppies facing their first ball shaped object. So, while the actual topic is as tedious as a flock of German civil servants working for the federal agency for tediousness in Tediousbrough, TL (Tediousland), the experience is actually quite fun.

And tomorrow I’ll be able to psychometrically test 100 unsuspecting students.

Mwuahahahahahahahaaaa (I worked on the laugh).

Signing off,

Fordiebianco

Raspberry Pi Day

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The little joy has finally arrived, and while it is an absolute delight, there are some caveats. HDMI doesn’t seem to work out of the box (firmware upgrade needed) and I had to use my TV’s compound video to start getting it going. Hence the rather creative cabling. Another problem are fancy USB peripherals: my spare USB Keyboard has loads of lights, but they overwhelm the little Pi’s power consumption, so it doesn’t work fully. Luckily SSH works without a problem, so I can use my Macbook’s terminal to set it up. But these little glitches don’t really matter. Most importantly, it works, and only costs 30 quid. How cool is that?