blog@tinla http://blog.tinla.com/ Recent articles at blog@tinla en-gb Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:00:02 GMT Kraftwerk at the Manchester Velodrome. MIF 2009. Kraftwerk were back in town last night as part of the Manchester International Festival 2009. They performed a lightly breathed upon version of the same show we were treated to back in 1994, the message of the day being "don't mess with a winning formula". Staging the performance at the Manchester Velodrome allowed the band to be joined by the GB Olympic Cycling team as they performed their classic track Tour de France, a classic meeting of music and man machine.

March 2004, Manchester Apollo
Kraftwerk Manchester Apollo 2004

July 2009, Manchester Velodrome
Kraftwerk Manchester Velodrome 2009

The new 3D visuals used during the second half of the performance.br> Kraftwerk Manchester Velodrome 2009

]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/20103.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/20103.html Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:13:16 GMT Photographs by Mia

]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/19322.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/19322.html Fri, 22 May 2009 12:49:38 GMT SoundManager 2 Support I have added some a basic SoundManager2 macro to the colablog engine. To use it you need to ensure that you have the following lines somewhere in the HEAD block of the site template:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://blog.tinla.com/bin/sm2/sm2-custom.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.tinla.com/bin/sm2/sm2-custom.js"></script>

and then just use the following macro wherever you want a player to appear:

<cb mp3withpreview::/path/to/file.mp3|/path/to/100x400-preview-image.jpg>

The marcos work like a playlist, when one finishes the playback automatically progresses to the next one. With any luck you get something like this when the macro(s) get expanded:

I know you'll love those sweet JPOP beats, according to wikipedia Genki Rockets (元気ロケッツ ?) is a hybrid band made up of unnamed musical artists. The face of the group is 18-year old Lumi, a fictional girl who was born in space on September 11, 2037 and has never been to Earth. Now thats my kind of band.

]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/19222.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/19222.html Sat, 16 May 2009 19:04:48 GMT Converging Wii Bowling Scores
But maybe she has me psyched me out? What else could explain my plummeting scores? Soon we'll be meeting in the middle ;)

Mia playing Wii Bowling

Mia playing Wii Bowling

]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/19156.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/19156.html Tue, 12 May 2009 19:15:07 GMT New Kitchen Anyone still checking this blog for updates has probably been wondering what has happened to me. The exciting excuse I have to offer (the most recent excuse at least) is that I've been distracted by an on-going kitchen fitting project. And if you don't think thats exciting then brace yourself for the inevitable photo compilation.
Our old kitchen was perhaps the only part of our house that genuinely annoyed us. It didn't have the space we needed. It was shabby.We disliked the colour. etc. etc. And even worse - it was hard wearing and refused to ever break in any meaningful way. Over Easter we finally snapped and decided to replace it.
We did a lot of shopping around and speaking to suppliers. They were pretty much all terrible. Some had good points - like B&Q's great hand-holding design service - but then they all ended up blowing it with crazy pricing and ludicrous 6 week lead times. Call me unreasonable but I almost never by anything unless I get my hands on it within a day or two. I've spent too long working with computers, where anything you can dream of can be shipped to you within 24 hours, to go back to accepting massive lead times. Add to that the instability in the market and you're highly unlikely to find me giving a glorified logistics company like B&Q such a long credit line.
If you go back to the basics you quickly come to the conclusion that a kitchen is a bunch of cheap pseudo-wood boxes with fancy doors hung on them. And no-one does cheap pseudo-wood better or cheaper than IKEA... and they have the whole lot in stock. If you want a solid wood kitchen to last 50 years then go elsewhere, but compared to rest of the competitive end of the market they're a breath of fresh air. They had everything in stock except for a couple of panels which we collected the next day. Superb. And they even let a loony like me run this lot through the express self-checkout (15 items or less) aisle ;)
You may also notice that the photo above contains 3 IKEA picture frames, an IKEA lamp, an IKEA rug and an IKEA sideboard (there is another one out of shot, along with an IKEA armchair, some more frames and probably a lot more stuff besides.)
So I just want it on record that I -hate- IKEA. I really like some of their products and their pricing can be compelling. But in their physical form of big blue boxes full of crowds of hellish people ... well that I hate.
The first job was to go a little crazy with the hammer, crowbar and saw. We cunningly managed to cling on to a working cooker for a few extra days by sawing the worktop into pieces with the hob and gas pipes still in place.
The wall mounted pipes were very annoying and required every floor unit to be modified in some way. This was especially tricky with the fancy carousel corner cupboard, but at the end of the day the trusty circular saw has ways of making things fit. Some minor changes were needed to the electrics to accommodate some new units and lights, it was all pretty easy if a bit time consuming.
Cutting the new worktops was one of three jobs for which I sought professional help. You need a proper guide (which is fairly expensive) a good router and a bit more confidence than I could muster. Getting them cut to properly knit together, fit the walls (which weren't square) and take the sink and hob was money well spent. I'd have undoubtedly destroyed at least one length of worktop trying to get it right.After they'd been cut it was fairly easy, but very fiddly, for me to fit everything to the units.
Professional helper number two was our friendly neighbour the plasterer. Doing the plastering after fitting the worktops was something we did because we were waiting for a gap in his scheduled work, but it actually turned out well.
While the plaster dried (the slowest part of the build?) I fitted the sink and redid all the under-sink plumbing. This was the most frustrating part of the project, and the only job I did where I had to re-buy parts and change my plan. Consumer "no solder" plumbing supplies are only just good enough to do the job they're sold for. My experience is that if you don't get it correct first time then you're better off binning them and starting again with replacements, or you'll never get a proper seal. Still, after a lot of messing about I now consider myself a master plumber and I even repaired a long standing low-pressure problem with our garden tap while I was at it.
Next came the paint. Not a lot to say about this... we went for white. Exciting stuff.
On the home straight, the wall cabinets went up in a single evening. Mind bogglingly simple compared to the base units. By this point we also had a working hob again, thanks to our final professional helper - a gas fitter.
And finally we're just about done. We have lights, we have plinth. We have the little wooden lip that goes around the floor. There are handles. And worktop matching upstands running around the wall. And a funky glass splashback. Yippee. All the tools are back in their boxes and you can make food without wading through sawdust. Happy days.
Most of the remaining jobs are fairly simple like replacing the face-plates on all the sockets and switches. The only significant bit left is making a nice new gloss box for the boiler.. we bought some extra panels (in the white) from IKEA for the job. Something for me to look at in a couple of weeks, when the family's sawdust aversion has died down a bit.
All in all this was a pretty simple build. It took 20 days from start to finish, which was longer than I'd expected but I can't complain as I hardly killed myself trying to get it done. If I'd booked workmen (rather than just phoning round neighbours and neighbours' friends asking for free time) then I'm sure it could have been done in a couple of weeks without too much stress. The average installation quote we had was something like £1800 to £2000 (with a 6 to 8 week lead time), lets just say that I'm very happy that I gave it a go.
]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/19058.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/19058.html Wed, 06 May 2009 20:50:36 GMT Making a Rubens' Tube Rubens Tube

Recently Ramdaq, Dicey & I were chatting about various ways to visualise music. The conversation passed through lasers and smoke and finally settled upon flames. I suggested a classic physics experiment and sensory overload all rolled into one... the Rubens' Tube.

A full write-up of this project can be read on Meejah.com.

Music - "Girl, Let Herself Go" by Ramdaq ft. Claude Boogie

]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/18251.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/18251.html Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:43:28 GMT Smörgåsbord of Updates
  • Last week I threw a quick site online for a new venture brother Pwetey D'Ramdaq is involved in - Loebeat. The site is a bit of a place holder for now, here are some polygons to make up for any sense of anti-climax. El Ramadaqo's various ventures and persona are so complicated and interlinked that I had to have it all explained to me ad-nausea before it sank in, but the meat of the issue is that Loebeat is going to be churning out some neato tunes very soon. Follow the progress on Meejah, which already has some great behind-the-scenes video.

  • I've taken to playing Wii Tennis with a semi-serious attempt to understand the game's control system. My intention was to get my "skill rating" to plot off the top of the graph, which I'd read happens are a score of around 2000. It actually goes off the graph at more like 1900 (which I've passed). Getting a 1900+ rating was surprisingly easy, especially considering that I tend to only play for quick 10 to 20 minute bursts a few times a week. Apparently things get a lot harder once you hit 2000.

  • I really liked the cocktail glass that I've used for the preview image for this post... but is it wrong that I like the photo it came from?

  • The lack of Mia photos is probably distressing my core readership, so here she is doing her best faux-fur wearing hair-flicking child-model impression.

  • Rebecca has discovered a new stickiest-substance-know-to-man, we'll be sending a sample to NASA in the morning. It mainly consists of melted marshmallows, sugar and egg whites.... and it works particularly well on cup cakes. Yummy.

  • The version of ImageMagick proposed to ship with Ubuntu 9.04 has broken SVG support, a pain if you're a fan of polygons. It renders stroke lines (and many other things) in a non-compliant way, for example something which should look like This ends up as This. Installing ImageMagick 6.4.9-8 (from source) fixes it.

  • And finally, but certainly most importantly, we have booked the anchor feature of our Summer Adventure (I'm capitalising "Summer Adventure" in the hope that it'll become a de-facto annual event), and we're off to Sweden. Many more details to follow eventually, but the teaser campaign starts here... I can confirm that we'll be building a log raft and spending four days sailing it (while wild camping) 50km down a Swedish river. The photo below is from another brave soul's trip along the same river...


    • Picture Credit - http://flickr.com/photos/8088927@N06/2787148048/

    ]]>     http://blog.tinla.com/article/17909.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/17909.html Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:08:03 GMT     Pancakes a Go-Go Uncle Buck

    Pancake Day Uncle Buck

    But we must set this godly effort aside, we mortals have no chance. So I've taken to novelty shapes as the preferred modus operandi. A kooky bear smothered in syrup takes a lot of beating.

    Pancake Day Pancake Day Pancake Day

    An to those poor deluded people that were considering skipping the food of the gods - I offer this battle cry:

    It's P-P-P-P-P-Pancake Day!

    ]]>     http://blog.tinla.com/article/17730.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/17730.html Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:05:11 GMT     Capture Manchester Competition Entry Capture Manchester Competition being run in association with the CUBE Gallery. They even had the decency to extend the deadline, a sure sign that they hadn't exactly been swamped with entries. Or maybe they'd been overwhelmed? Oh well, too late for that... I've entered now.

    The first job was to cook up the idea for an iconic image of some sort. I would then render it in polygons, I am becoming firm in the mindset that all art should be rendered in polygons. Preferably triangles. So I wandered the streets of Manchester last Friday looking for something that fit the vision.

    I knew that I wanted a sweeping roof-line of some sort, ideally with a curve and some strong blue above it. The silhouette needed to be strong and recognisable. And it needed to mean something to me personally - entering this competition is highly unlikely to yield a financial rewards so it is critical that the image is worth my time in its own right.

    Candidates from my youth were Central Library (more specifically the side passage that curves around it) and GMEX (now renamed to something else).

    Capture Manchester Competition Entry Capture Manchester Competition Entry Capture Manchester Competition Entry

    These two are pretty good. But then you realise that GMEX is nothing like as pleasant to look at as it is to remember, and the central library passageway is something I didn't really want to claim represented anything meaningful about Manchester as a whole.

    Whereas the Urbis building does say a lot about Manchester, and more importantly means a lot to me. So that's what I ended up using.

    A lot of people dislike the Urbis building. It is undeniably trying a little too hard to be different and attention grabbing. Personally I like the way it looks, and I like that it is trying. I hold no real opinion on it as a working space and have spent mere minutes inside, but the areas around it are very meaningful to me and in the end perhaps that is why I like it.

    I used to linger around the old corn exchange (now the Triangle, next door to Urbis) buying comics and watching the cooler grunge kids laze around the gardens drinking cider. I would take my crappy Walkman and listen to mix tapes while studying obscure dance and jungle records in tiny smoke filled basement shops. I knew a lot about those weird basement shops, and I like the fact that the vast majority of people didn't even care they were there.

    Not long after I grew out of all that the IRA bombed the place. A handy full-stop into the narrative which gave the planners an opportunity to "regenerate" that end of town. Swanky new buildings, boutique shops and higher rents all became the rage.

    The timing was very handy because I didn't have to see them rip it all down, I was away from approx 1996 to 2000... and by the time I noticed what they were up to the Urbis building was getting its final lick of paint. So I like it. And hence it became my source image.

    Capture Manchester Competition Entry Capture Manchester Competition Entry

    I didn't exactly pick a good day to photograph Manchester, it was cold and very dark. The image I ended up using was far from perfect, but a frankly ludicrous 1/9th second exposure managed to capture some of the blue/green tint on the building and gave a bright sky without being completely washed out. But it wasn't a blue sky, and I wanted a smooth fade, and all the gray in the foreground would have to go, etc, etc.

    The key thing is that I had the building silhouette. Which was all I really wanted. The rest I painted out or coloured bright green. The green isn't a complete fabrication by the way, Urbis has copper roofing elements. So even though it mostly looks blue there is a distinct green shine when the light catches it.. anyway... I wanted a blue sky and a green building and to hell with it.

    I was set on having a lot of empty space at the top and to the left of the building's front edge, with a gradient fade from dark to light proceeding down the image. My intention was to give the feel of something rising up rather than just being static, Godzilla leaping up out of Tokyo harbour probably covers it.

    The image above right became the "master" image given to the polygon-farming program I've written. Much more info on that here. After many, many, iterations you end end up with pictures like these:

    Capture Manchester Competition Entry Capture Manchester Competition Entry

    And eventually you get something like this:

    Capture Manchester Competition Entry Capture Manchester Competition Entry

    The image above left has had the opacities slightly altered to emphasise the "framing" of the black rectangle "under" the polygons. The image above right has had some of the colour from the original master image bled back in. This takes away the pure vector-image nature, but the trade off is that it brings back some texture and hinting for the eye. I should probably have spent time tidying the stepped edges of the raster-image elements... but oddly I decided I liked the contrast and left them in.

    Finally I did something that forever renders the image an also-ran in the competition stakes - I added cheesy caption text.

    Part of me knows you're not supposed to do things like this if you want to call it art and have everyone keep a straight face. A larger, and more important, part of me likes cheesey captions and worries that people won't know which way around to hold it without a hint.

    The final product is below. It will be printed as a 6 inch by 4 inch postcard and exhibited at the CUBE Gallery from 28th March to 9th April 2009. Click on the image below to load a huge version, but be warned that it may slow your computer to a crawl while it tries to draw it.

    Capture Manchester Competition Entry

    ]]>     http://blog.tinla.com/article/17585.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/17585.html Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:45:50 GMT     Spotify - Online music finally getting done right
  • Pre-release albums that I'm marginally excited about. I download them, listen to them twice and then forget they exist. The most recent example being the new Prodigy album. I've already forgotten what its called and it doesn't even hit retail until the end of this month. Not a good sign.
  • Dance/Trance/Ambient mixes, the longer the better. I have an intense dislike of gaps and play-list management, so downloading a year's worth of some Dutch radio channel's weekly trance mix is perfection. Once a week (or less) I spend 10 minutes browsing The Mixing Bowl and I have more music queued than I'll ever listen to. The only problem is that very rarely my brief radio sessions will yield some music I actually like, or want to hear more of. Recently Mia has developed a real liking for Duffy... which seems to get a lot of airplay on ASDA's in-store muzak system. Now I have a solution for these too - Spotify.

    Spotify is a fairly new Peer-to-Peer streaming music library thingy based out of the UK. Their library is far from complete... but it is remarkably good and has managed to cover 95% of the tracks I've wanted since signing up. Couple this with the price (Free) and there is finally a music service that's beginning to rival the Napster of old for convenience. The unskippable audio adverts are short enough (and infrequent enough) to not ruin the whole thing... and even the stupid user interface can't put me off. (Why are all the hip new "media" players still taking their design cues from Quicktime, a program so hideous that it was inducted into the interface hall of shame way back in 1999? eg. Songbird, Miro, et al. The ipod has (had?) the best user interface of all physical players but that doesn't mean that apple know best, itunes and quicktime are monstrous). But I risk sidetracking into a rant. I like this program despite all the failings. I even like it despite the fact it doesn't natively run on Linux and hence I have to run it under wine. But I don't like it enough to pay for their "premium" subscription service... obviously ;)

    Spotify

    ]]> http://blog.tinla.com/article/17558.html http://blog.tinla.com/article/17558.html Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:45:11 GMT