stevewilde.com

Posts about my music, art and photography, with a little Android/Geo/AR stuff on the side. 

New Tune Up At SoundCloud: Hikikomori

        Hikikomori  by  starck

Well, here's another track, but at the rate I am going I don't see the rough mixes being in place until May so it's looking like a late summer kind of album all of a sudden. Anyway, this track is Hikikomori which utilises an old keyboard part I had from way back. It just needs some more drum work... Well, I think. What do you think? Comments on the SoundCloud page please.

Hikikomori is a Japanese term for the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life.

Next Up: Gene Sequencer

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Filed under  //   Me++   MP3   music   starck  

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Geospatial Technology

As we push into 2010 Location Based Services and Augmented Reality really seem to be coming to the fore at last. Well they certainly are in my corner of the twittersphere and if the applications that are appearing for Android are any indication as well. I've been following these developments avidly for the past couple of months keeping pages of notes [well, mostly links] which I have tried to arrange into something coherent here. It could ramble a bit, bear with me and please add any comments if you have any.

 

At the moment I have LayarBrightkite, AloqaWikitudeFoursquareHere I Am and Maverick installed on my G1. Not to mention Google Maps, My Maps and My Tracks. And Google appear to be upping the ante as well with the introduction of Labs for Maps and their own layers option. I currently have a Buzz layer, Latitude and My Maps and there are more, such as Wikipedia and Favorite Places [which is limited to selected "celebs" favourite places at the moment]. In the US they have introduced Near Me Now which may go towards realising something that I will be touching on later. I'm thinking of this with phones in mind but of course there is the netbook and with the introduction of the Dell Mini 5 and the like we have something that falls between the two. I'm going to concentrate on Android apps as that's what I use.

 

Of the apps I have installed I have been using Brightkite the longest. Before I had an Android phone I was using it online and on my mobile, manually adding postcodes to check in. I have actually used it less since having an app and a phone with GPS but that has mostly been due to usability issues. It can be slow to load in busy area, as can most Location Based Services, especially Google Maps, which is something that doesn't seem to get addressed too often when discussing the development of locational tools. And the accuracy, when satellites can be located, can leave a lot to be desired. I tend to only use Brightkite to “check in” to restaurants or bars that I visit as a sort of geo-bookmark these days.

 

I have only recently looked at Foursquare, similar to Brightkite, but as it appears to be pretty US-centric I haven't looked too closely yet.

 

I think Layar must be the first Augmented Reality app that I used and I did use it quite a bit when I first downloaded it. Mainly because the twitter layer is fascinating if you need to kill some time in a busy area as you can amuse yourself reading the tweets of people in the vicinity. But I haven't used it for anything serious, or much at all lately. I think I will take a look at tweetjourney soon though. Really Layar need to be adding the option to create your own layers. Maybe Reality Browser 3.0 does just that. I'm just downloading it to see. I know it supports 3-D but I'm not too concerned about that yet although it is obviously crucial to gaming which I think will be what will push the development of Augmented Reality.

 

Wikitude [another Augmented Reality app] have introduced the option to personalise your experience by adding your own content and already has some interesting “Worlds of Points Of Interest”. Again, not something that I have had the time to investigate fully but definitely heading towards some of the requirements I will be mentioning later on.

 

Aloqa I have to say I have only used to find a cash machine once but it was very quick and accurate but it looks like a glorified listings app to me.

 

Maverick and My Tracks both serve very similar purposes in that they can record journeys and map them retrospectively or you can load journeys up to them and use them as a sat nav. And Here I am does exactly that. Allows you to share your location via e-mail, SMS or pretty much any other Social Media so long as you can do it via your phone. Maverick and Here I am work in tandem and have come to be my most used tools lately as I can keep a record of locations without having to ping it to all and sundry in real time.

 

I expect there is a lot more I haven't seen yet. If so, let me know what you use and why. Whether they are Android, iPhone or Blackberry apps.

I have a few ideas for projects I'd like to get off the ground using locational information. Mostly art based. Some quite basic, using QR Codes, whose simplicity shouldn't be overlooked and which should be part of our Augmented Reality considerations, as indeed they have for over a decade in Japan.

Since I started living on a busy main road it has fascinated me how the local bird life manages to make itself heard over the traffic and sirens. Much of birdsong is of course territorial and one of the options I have considered for my Urban/Avain is the geographic aspect. There are many strands to the project, which at the moment is a growing series of ambient pieces based on birdsong samples but which ultimately I hope to be a full scale installation including human size bird boxes. But more of that another day.

 

This got me considering geo-tagged music generally. And given the state of the music industry any alternatives to promoting music have to be an option, why not location based music? If there is a way to make it unique and marketable? Freesound already has a database of geo-tagged sounds, although these are mainly "Field Recordings". Also, Audio-Tagger allows you to upload geo-tagged recordings from a mobile phone but what about location aware MP3 files. How possible would that be? This could be useful for location specific podcasts and/or audiobooks/walks as well as music. I can imagine something like this augmented reality music mixer working on a larger scale as well.

 

I'm sure someone has already implemented geo-information into books somehow, even if it was just the addition of a map! But QR Codes could add links to maps or any other data from books or other printed material. Although with the headway that the e-Book appears to be making now that could all be obsolete in no time and there lies another thread for discussion but, suffice to say, I have a few ideas for a book including geo-data. 


What I really need is some way of geo-tagging places of interest as I find them online such as bars, restaurants, galleries, hotels. maybe a use for Microformats?

 

These bookmarked, geo-tagged, web pages could then be included on a map layer that I would have the option of sharing or not and when I get to an area where I have bookmarked several places of interest my phone would alert me that I was near them. In a similar way that Latitude alerts you when you are near a friend that you share your location details with.

 

For instance, last year I went to Manchester to see Prima Donna, the Rufus Wainwright opera. My "Imaginary Location Tool" could have sensed that my train was pulling into Piccadilly station and alerted me where the hotel I had booked into was, along with directions or local cab numbers. It could also then tell me that the venue for the opera was x miles from there and that the restaurant I had booked lunch in was x miles away too Or that I had bookmarked the local Art Gallery as a potential place to visit once' maybe calling up my Google Calendar to see if I had time to fit a visit in?

 

I can think of several ways to cobble most of that together with existing tools but the alerting part is eluding me. Any ideas? You can get alerts for speed cameras etc so why not other things? Maybe this mapme.ie site is almost there or could be with a bit of adaptation. Or maybe this Yahoo patent is the answer.

 

I'd like to be able to pull up all my geo-tagged information in one place, preferably within a map. Be it all my photo's, bookmarks, tweets even docs, scanned or otherwise wherever it's relevant. This could be a personal, private layer in some sort of Augmented Reality app.

 

What about Augmented Personalities? The Internet Of Things needn't exclude you! What if you could wear a QR Code or an RFID tag, even Bluetooth, with a link to your Google Profile or your blog or something that showed what was currently playing on your iPhone/pod or your latest Spotify playlist, or tweets or Facebook updates?


I fear that the majority of Augmented Reality apps will be advertising based base, especially if Google have anything to do with it, and they will. Ikea have already started to embrace AR and I can see how this will lend itself to retail outlets and marketing. I am guessing that we will get something akin to Second Life based on Google or Yahoo or Bing maps? Possibly Bing as their Photosynthesis tool would lend itself nicely to this. I'm sure we will certainly get a lot of games of varying degrees of interest.


But until we get anywhere near that surely we need more accurate GPS in cities? We need better ways of digesting this information on the move. I for one don't want to be standing outside a station waving my phone around trying to locate somewhere in certain parts of London. There are AR glasses [even contact lenses in development] but they need to come way down in price not to be considered a "muggable peripheral" as well! And we definitely need longer lasting battery life to compensate for the increased GPS use.

 

Unfortunately, I expect we will get a lot more creative uses of location based services for crime and there are a lot of scaremongers who, to a degree, have already raised concerns about security issues with Google. Once Google Goggles is able to recognise faces and present you with data about that person, then you can start worrying. I don't doubt that will happen though in the meantime maybe Google should invest some of its profits into battery development and getting more satellites into space for more accurate location fixes?


Hopefully somebody will start to create the AR apps that I am looking for before I have to get myself too involved with API's and the like. I have read my Yahoo Pipes book and will be starting my KML book soon so should be able to mash something up without the air turning too blue. But I really want to focus on creating things that can make use these developments rather than the developments themselves. 


Unfortunately most of my friends and colleagues have little or no interest in Social Media or Augmented Reality outside of throwing the odd comment up at Facebook. Most of them still use their phones to speak to people! And when you are out with people like this you can't spend too much time checking-in everywhere you go or checking twitter. It gets frowned upon... So I don't know how they are going to cope with me experiencing a tagged world via my phone's screen in the future. They'll all come round to it I suppose. I don't really expect I am in the right demographic for this sort of behaviour anyway, but saying that I don't see teenagers buying into it much either yet. Unless they are geo-tagging their You Tube clips?


I started writing this post based mostly on links I came across in tweets, I read a lot of useful pages, some of which are linked to in the text above but others that didn't fit the bill but are still of interest are listed below.

 

 

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Filed under  //   augmented reality   geo   location based services   QR Codes  

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New Tune Up At SoundCloud: Funktioista

   Funktioista  by  starck

I'm back on track for another week with the rough mixes. This is 4 out of 10. It has been through three incarnations and I have reverted to the first one as it seemed the funkiest and I wasn't going to do something easy like change the name to for the tune! I like the word Funktioista, which I believe is Finnish for function, so I'm sticking with it.

Anyway, as always, give it a listen and if you have any comments leave them on the SoundCloud page.

Next Up: Hikikomori

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Digital Music Distributors Redux

Indie music promotion update: I've been finding a lot more music promo/distribution sites since my last post about such things. Music Glue produce a widget to promote tracks, which I would have included below [for my free TXT track] but it didn't render and all I ended up in the post is code! It's the only service I've tried yet too. 

I've also been looking at TunecoreAWAL and Reverb Nation. Also Radar Music Videos is a matchmaking site for musicians and, er... videomakers. I'm trying to get my head around all the info on the IFPI site too.

Tunecore is $19.98/year/album maintenance charge and 99 cents per song per store. AWAL has a brilliant site design and cover ISRC, which I haven't seen anywhere else, other than Music Glue, and is something I need to get my head around. There are no costs but they take 15% commission over a 30 day rolling term and there are no take down charges. To be fair, I think most places don't have a take down charge after a fixed period. Reverb Nations site is positively shambolic layout wise compared to the spacious AWAL. On Reverb Nation there is no minimum number of tracks per album, and a maximum of 50 track. $34.95 will get you a 12-track album, submitted to 10 online music stores, [+ a UPC code]. 

Some other music related sites I encountered during my searches include...

Fairtilizer looks as though it sits somewhere between the distributors above and more Social Networking based sites like SoundCloud. Tweet-For-A-TrackTwtmuzik and Tweet My Song  are variations on viral song sharing tools for twitter and Pledge Music gives musicians and fans the opportunity to "work together" and raise money for charity.

I like this use of Soundcloud and it is a good primer on remix contests. You can promote remixes with Indaba Music. There are a few SoundCloud mash-ups out there including Mixcloud and CloudPayer, which I am having trouble saving playlists on.

In theory the idea of having your tunes performable in Rock Band is great but I'm not sure if its a simple or economic process. I think Tunecore can assist. They are also distributing via MySpace Music now too. 

Hobnox audiotool could be an alternative to Aviary's Myna. It's a great design with vintage boxes all in Flash form!

Just to close a few blog posts that are of interest as well.

I hope some of those links are useful to someone. If you have any experience of the services listed here please share them with us in the comments, I'd be interested to hear them.

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Filed under  //   digital   distribution   MP3   Music  

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Moo Test

In case any of you were wondering what this post was in aid of. I have just spent a pleasant 90 minutes at Moo Towers this evening assisting with, along with 9 other Moo fanatics, the testing their new "sharing" widget.

It's basically a way to share the images you upload to Moo when you create mini-cards, business cards etc. I had some success, to twitter and Blogspot. But my posts to Posterous and my Blogger blog on my hyperrealandsupercool.com domain rendered sans images. So there is still a bit of work to do there for them. But otherwise it is looking good. 

Apart from being a tool to promote Moo I can't see too much benefit for those uploading the images, especially if you already have your photos up at flickr or somewhere but I might still use the widget somewere just because Moo is one of those companies you just like. Its an easy to use web site, good quality prints, efficient turnaround and they were all jolly nice folk. Besides which there was free beer and some other goodies. I'm particularly pleased with my business card holder [although I'm surprised they weren't Moo branded ones!].

Anyway, as the widget didn't render here properly I've taken it down. I think it will be best suited within a template rather than a blog post anyway. So, once they're out of beta, you will probably see it here.

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One Day I'm Going To Write A Post About Procrastination


All the time I am out and about I'm not getting anything done. Well obviously I am getting the things I went out to do done but the list of projects I have at home aren't being done. And what do I do when I get home? I write about what I just did, where I just went or where I may be going next. If I'm not doing that I am reading e-mails, 
RSS Feeds [though not so much since the advent of Twitter... I'm starting a post about that too!] or Tweets. Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one putting off work in this way... Or not managing their time effectively as others would say but I do have a very long list of things that I should be doing instead.

First off there is an album to finish, which has been started three times. Secondly there is a new website [this one here] to finish in order to promote the previous two albums, a book and some artwork. And I intend to replace the blog on my original site with a mobile site for the geo stuff below.

Then there is a "Birdsong" project/installation [Urban/Avian] and I've got some ideas for a geo-locational bunch of tunes [I'm not even considering the album idea any more once the third one is finished] which is involving a lot of research into Augmented Reality, Location Based Services and Quick Response codes. Then there is another book [graphics and text this time].

I also have an idea for stems of music that are inter-changeable so that the listener can make their own mix [It's the future according to something I read the other day. You see? Reading and not doing again] but that's hardly a new idea now. There is an unfinished video project, although I think thats going to require a new PC as I want to use Photoshop to edit multiple frames and previous attempts have just crashed my current one. It's stop-frame and going to be very time consuming.

There must be some famous procrastinators. You know, ones that ended up not being in the wrong place at the right time... Or vice-versa... and all that? There must have been times when letting someone else say what you  were thinking but putting off saying got them into deep water instead of you... or me? But then again maybe they ended up getting the credit for something you thought about ages ago!

Still, by finishing this off I can tick off the fifth of seven tasks I set myself to do today [or yesterday now!], which isn't too shabby.

Post latest photos to flickr  
Read last three days bookmarked web pages [approx 40]
Finish Robo Sapien and post to SoundCloud
Write Tumblr post on last three art events attended
Finish "Procrastination" post
Look into Microstock Photography sites
Start Location Based Services Post [5 x A4 pages of notes for this though]

Still, another day tomorrow... except I'm out. And I think I only have one night in next week. Anybody want to do my day job for me? it's really getting in the way!

Zemanta helped me add links & pictures to this email. It can do it for you too.

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Filed under  //   Blogging   GTD  

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New Tune Up At SoundCloud: Robo Sapien

 

 Robo Sapien  by  starck 

Another track from the forthcoming Me++. Not sure I've really finished this yet. I feel it needs another part and the arrangement could do with some more work. But I said I would post a new track per week and I'm already 3 weeks behind! I'll replace the file when I've done a bit more work on it.

If you have any suggestions, post them up at Soundloud.

Next Up: Funktioista

 

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Earworms And Other Bodily Ticks

I know earworms [from the German "Ohrwurm"] are tunes that get stuck in your head and are usually the last thing that you heard before leaving the house or something; but I have a series of bizarre tunes/whistles/hums that spring out of nowhere on a regular basis for no apparent reason and are not anything that I have heard recently at all! I don't even watch TV that much yet they all appear to be TV themes and some of these shows I haven't seen in years.

Try these for size...

The theme from the Antiques Roadshow
The theme from the Thin Blue Line
The theme from Terry & June
The theme from Paddington

21/01/10 UPDATE: @chirbit added these to via twitter which I must say cracked me up!

Why the hell is that? Are they really that catchy? Maybe I should try to work these sort of motif's into tunes? I'm still pondering whether or not to pursue writing House versions of Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da, My Old Man's A Dustman orKnees Up Mother Brown, which can be quite happily sung along to most House tunes much to the annoyance of fellow party goers. The "um-diddle-iddle-iddle-um-diddle-ay" refrain from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is fair game too

Maybe it's a certain "mentality"? I am the sort of person that will make up ridiculous lyrics to anything I hear on the radio and I add up the numbers of car registration plates for entertainment quite frequently as well! I've been calculating the dates that will have binary numbers next year too, but that was prompted by the fact that we had considered 101010 to be a good date to get married. We in fact settled for 8.9.10. This was all prompted by Sam though so I can't take all of the credit for that. But I did pursue it further! For instance by calculating all the decimal numbers for each binary date in 2010 and that each of those three days in January, October or November increment by 16 every month... And that each consecutive month increments the previous by 12.

010110 = 22 + 16 [Jan 1st]
100110 = 38 + 16 [Jan 10th]
110110 = 54        [Jan 11th]

011010 = 26 + 16 [Oct 1st]
101010 = 42 + 16 [Oct 10th]
111010 = 58        [Oct 11th]

011110 = 30 + 16 [Nov 1st]
101110 = 46 + 16 [Nov 10th]
111110 = 62        [Nov 11th]

Jan = 114 + 12
Oct = 126 + 12
Nov = 138

Which all adds up to 378. What does that all mean? 

I have no idea but I do know that I still haven't got the third track ready to post to SoundCloud yet. I haven't totally been wasting my time writing most of this this evening though. This post is one of 10 partially [and I do mean 10 and not 2 in this case!] completed posts I have in my GMail drafts. 

If you have any theories do let me know!

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Filed under  //   2010   binary   maths   music   TV  

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First Decade Of The 20th Century

While everyone gets excited about what the first decade of the 21st Century has given us I thought I'd see how it compares to the first decade of the last millennium...

I900

The Zeppelin was invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and Charles Seeberger redesigned Jesse Reno's escalator to invent the modern escalator.

1901

King Camp Gillette invented the double-edged safety razor. The first radio receiver successfully received a radio transmission and Hubert Booth invented a compact and modern vacuum cleaner.

1902

Willis Carrier invented the air conditioner. The lie detector or polygraph machine was invented by James Mackenzie while George Claude invented neon light.

1903

The Wright brothers invented the first gas motored and manned airplane. Bottle-making machinery was invented by Michael J. Owens. Mary Anderson invented windshield wipers and William Coolidge invented the ductile tungsten used in lightbulbs.

1904

Teabags were invented by Thomas Suillivan and John A Fleming invented the vacuum diode or Fleming valve.

1905

Albert Einstein published the Theory of Relativity and made famous the equation, E = mc2.


1906

William Kellogg invented Cornflakes, Lewis Nixon invented the first sonar like device and Lee Deforest invented the electronic amplifying tube (triode).

1907

Leo Baekeland invented the first synthetic plastic called Bakelite. Color photography was invented by Auguste and Louis Lumiere and the very first piloted helicopter was invented by Paul Cornu.

1908 

The Model T was first sold. J W Geiger and W Müller invented the Geiger counter. The gyrocompass was invented by Elmer A. Sperry and Cellophane was invented by Jacques E. Brandenberger. 

1909

Instant coffee was invented by G. Washington.

Bit different from the nanotechnology, robotics and stem-cell developments or full scale terrorism, iPhones and YouTube etc. of this Millennium isn't it?

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Filed under  //   20th Century   21st Century   decade   inventions   millennium  

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Amazon Widgets

I didn't get the next Me++ track mixed down in time for this week. I knew I wouldn't. I blame the various Christmas commitments of the past week. Hopefully there will be some more time next week once my birthday is out the way that is... And before New Year kicks in.

So, instead, this evening I've been playing with these Amazon Widgets. I've done one for my own albums, one for my Top 10 Albums 2009 and one for Books Read 2009 [except the limit is 10 items]. It would be nice to see click throughs via these as I've never had much joy with Google Ads.

Anyone got any tips on customising My Posterous HTML/CSS. I'd quite like to get widgets etc down either side here. I should look at a few others' pages. Any recommendations?


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