One fast:

(Via Bottom Half Nude

( And one slower one )

From The FAQ page of the Cosmovox web site. (Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

It’s a novel musical instrument but apparently takes some practice to make good sounds with (which is par for the course for a musical instrument, surely). Might be hard to perform live dramatically in that it mostly would involve standing stock still and waggling your hand up and down.

I eagerly await the first iPhone orchestra, where all the various virtual musical instruments are in use simultaneously.

(Via beatonna)


(Via this response)

This is a late addition to my snaps from the Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element album launch in the Wheatsheaf on Oxford on 30 May 2008: I used my dinky pocket camera to record the final song from Space Heroes of the People, ‘Motorway to Moscow’. They had had part of Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis (1927) playing in the background, and the famously fickle finger of fate determined that the robot transformation scene turn up just as this song started. The result was a level of awesomeness that my camera and YouTube can offer you a tiny glimmer of.

I took a few shots of the Pandaemonium Picnic performance on Saturday. Only a couple came out. Two short clips are on Flickr:



A longer clip of the finale is on YouTube:

How to play the drums and piano if you can’t play the drums or piano. (Via my dad.)

I previously linked to the Archie Comics cover of ‘Common People’ by Pulp. Here’s Shatner’s version, with visuals lifted from the Animated Series. (Via Therin of Andor)

(Editied to correct attribution of the song!)

A vistor to our garden—perhaps we have new neighbours and they have brought a new cat?

This is my first attempt at adding a soundtrack with iMovie—it seems to have come out at FULL VOLUME so be prepared to cover your ears.

( And here’s Part II )

Blake’s Seven introduction on io9, complete with an Avon quip compilation, and a dodgy VHS transfer of the final episode for people who like to spoil the ending before watching the rest of the series.

This is the game demo I mentioned down the pub last night. The thing which interests me is that he describes the iPhone as being more like a complete console than like a cramped little phone platform—and they were able to make a demo of their current console game, not a pokey 2d solitaire variant from ten years ago. Presumably the inclusion of OpenGL and OpenAL frameworks helps.

Click through to YouTube and click on ‘More videos from this chap’ to see the Spore and Touch Fighter demo clips. These are all excerpted from the hour-long iPhone Roadmap presentation on 6 March.

The reason I am interested is not for the iPhone per se but because the above also run on the iPod Touch like wot I have.

[Tried to post this yesterday but Flickr refused. So posted from Youtube instead!]

Had Christmas lunch hosted by squigglyruth and truecatachresis with oxfordslacker, and mr_snips. Goose was eaten, we deployed the card tabke and sorted out the German postal system after a bout of Zombie Fluxx. Our hosts showed us the Wii version of Guitar Hero, and tonyjo discovered she seems to be a natural at this game (or perhaps the similarity of the instrument to a cello or violin helps).

In the end the pudding had to be indefinitely postponed—none of us felt we could do it justice after stuffing ourselves at lunch.


Today I have been mostly assembling the robot kangaroo illustrated here. It comes in a box with little bags containing tiny, tiny screws and various other itty bitty bits and bobs. It comes with a small screwdriver, the world’s smallest Allen key, and a tube of grease, but you have to supply your own modelling knife and tweezers.

ATP is a music festival held in an out-of-season Butlins holiday camp—thus avoiding the traditional problem with music festivals, which is having to live in a tent for a few nights.

This year I shared a chalet with oxfordslacker, motodraconis, badasstronaut, timscience, and cleanskies. I took some photos, but those attempts at taking pix of performances tend to suffer from the low light and my distance from the stage. Moto’s photos from her much more high-falutin’ camera have much better shots of people on stage. Debra’s photos have more of those intimate chalet scenes, including dreamy close-ups of Jeremy’s latest invention, the Champagne Screen Saver cocktail. Alex supplies capsule reviews of some of the bands via the magic of (Loud)Twitter: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning. These are especially amusing when read aloud by the Mac’s speech synthesiser. As well as the aforementioned cocktail, Jeremy has posted a clip of the Chrome Hoofs, a performance I tragically missed.

Steve Jobs has announced the future availability of a software-development kit for the iPhone, which we assume will have access to all the iPhone's input devices, including its accelerometers. Here's what someone called ealf has already done with a hacked model. Won't it be fun when everyone is developing mini-Wii-style games for this gadget?

Before starting to build our greenhouse we had another chore to on Sunday: taking Jeremy’s pterodactyl on a fly around Port Meadow. I have attempted to capture some of the experience on video.

Alas! I am still having trouble working out a combination of parameters that makes video that will not look like trash on YouTube, so it is a little fuzzy. But hopefully entertaining for the 82 seconds it lasts for.

Virtuoso lightsaber dueling from the people who I would imagine brought us Ryan vs Dorkman at some point in the past. (Via my baby brother.)

This is fan filmdom stripped to the bare essentials: there are no attempts to tie it in with the plot or characters of Star Wars, or even to emulate their costuming: the opening scene is the two combatants striding in to an ordinary-looking factory floor in their ordinary-looking clothes. Who are they? Why do they fight? We aren’t told.

Given my usual complaint about the prequels was that you don’t care about the duels because you don’t particularly care about the characters, my first thought was that I would find this even sparser story uninvolving, but actually it was really entertaining—thrilling in places and with a couple of scenes that made me laugh out loud at their clever use of the Jedi conventions. It’s like seeing your favourite indy band playing unplugged, bringing the skills of the performers to the fore because there are no distractions.

Apparently this commercial originates in France, in which case I am slightly surprised at the language used at the end. :-)

This clip is hosted on YouTube, but I recommend that you don’t read the comments.

This is the thrilling, or at least short, sequel to Airship Versus Rocket. Having claimed a victory by default in the battle of the flying machines, Tim shows Jeremy how to fire a rocket.

YouTube footage of what a solar airship looks like when you obey the instructions and wait for better weather conditions … !

Click on the picture to see Airship Versus Rocket, a short short film, editied down from footage of our scientific experiment conducted in Port Meadow last weekend. This was recorded on my pocket camera (Fujifilm Finepix Z2 Zoom), which will happily record VGA-sized video for 12-13 minutes. The edited version is a hopefully less tedious 2:49.

Thanks to Dad & Josie, who gave me the airship for my birthday. Hope you’re not too horrified by the terrible things we did to it!

tinyjo has a clip taken from a different angle.

Perhaps this will work:



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