belgie.popnuuz.com - overzicht van Belgische krantenartikels

Ik heb mijn inspiratie getrokken uit zowel krantenkoppen.be als popurls.com . Je ziet een korte inhoud van het artikel als je over de link gaat met je muis (’mouse-over‘) zodat je beter kan beslissen of je het artikel wil lezen of niet. Er is een splitsing op topics: zowel inhoudelijk (binnenland/buitenland/economie/…) als geografisch (per provincie), en per categorie wordt er een top 50 bijgehouden, alsook een globale top 50. Hoe meer mensen de site gebruiken als nieuwsoverzicht en doorklikken naar artikles, hoe waardevoller de Populaire Artikels in Belgie - belgie.popnuuz.com/pop link wordt.

De bronnen zijn, naast de kranten, ook de tijdschriftten (Knack/Trends) en enkele websites (Clint, Brusselblogt/Gentblogt). De URL laat vermoeden dat er ook een franstalige versie kan komen, en dat is dan ook correct. Ik ben nu nog bezig met het verzamelen van  de juiste RSS feeds daarvoor.

Check het eens uit!

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In a sensible world, all ’small’ things would have a mini USB (5V) power connector, all ‘medium’ things would run on 12V DC with 1 (one) standard coax connector and the rest would be on 220V AC. Let’s see how far we are from that situation:

• A USB connection can power up to 500 mA (900 mA in USB 3.0 - wikipedia), although the iPhone  seems to draw up to 1A. So any device that required less than 5W or certainly less than 2.5W, can get all it needs from a USB connector. Why are there then so many GSM and Bluetooth device vendors that insist on using their own proprietary connectors? Samsung, SonyEriccson, LG … I’m looking at you! I remember having at one point 3 different Samsung phones in the house and they all used a different non-compatible power supply. Nokia at least tried to keep the same (coax-like) power connectors until they started making smartphones that needed more power, and they made adaptors with a smaller pin. But Nokia: if Apple can power their iPhones/iPods with USB, then you can do that too.
• Some devices need more power, so there should be standard for 12V too. You can run hard disks, routers, laptops and even desktop computers on only 12V! (”The Google plan calls for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard” - NYTimes 2006). Unfortunately there is no such thing as “the 12V plug”. There are a number of similar but not compatible ‘coax’ plugs around. If there would be a standard for 12V DC devices: you could have a 12V circuit in your home, or at least next to your computer, so that you power all devices with 1 big, efficient transformer. Also, you would have a collection of 12V transformers lying around that you could interchange without thinking. Compare that to having to buy an extra Apple Magsafe adaptor at 90 euro (the Magsafe for Mac Mini: 16.5 V - 3.7 A = 60W!).
  
• If you need more than 60W, you can either take AC or think of some 24V standard.

I know the GSM industry is already talking about it (”The group agreed that by the 1st January 2012, the majority of all new mobile phone models available will support a universal charging connector” - GSMworld). Apparently they want to standardize on Micro-USB. It’s a pity I haven’t seen a lot of devices with Micro-USB yet. I hope we’ll have Mini-USB to Micro-USB dongles so that we can keep on using our ‘old’ power cables.

Micro /mini / USB-B / USB-A female / USB-A male

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1. Find a source file

• I typically start from an existing MP3 file. It might be a CD I have ripped to MP3, or a soundtrack from DVDs or other sound bites. I also have a collection of accapella samples that are a nice source.

2. Create the 15 - 30 sec tone in MP3 format

• You don’t need a 5 min ringtone, just 15 to 30 seconds will be enough
• I use Audacity (with the LAME MP3 encoder add-on) to load the full source MP3 file, trim out the piece I want and then add a fade-in and fade-out.

3. Export to MP3

• I then export the file to an MP3 file of 128kbps. You don’t need better quality than that anyway. If you want, you can convert the file to mono here, or it can happen in the next step
• Result: ringtone.mp3

4. Convert with ffmpeg to MPEG4 ringtone

• I prefer using the command-line ffmpeg for transcoding of audio and video.
• The simple way of doing it: ffmpeg -i ringtone.mp3 -y ringtone.m4a (.m4a stands for MPEG4 audio, ffmpeg will see this extension and use default settings for the conversion.) Afterwards you then have to change the extension to .m4r (MPEG4 ringtone).
• The detailed one-step-only way to do this: ffmpeg.exe -i ringtone.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -y ringtone.m4r

5. Open file with iTunes

• Just double-click the file, that should do it.

The lazy way:

let’s make a batch file that will automatically convert the first 30 seconds of any MP3 file into an iPhone ringtone:
SET INPUT=%1
SET NAME=%INPUT:.mp3=%
SET OUTPUT=%NAME%.m4r
echo CONVERT %INPUT% to %OUTPUT% ...
ffmpeg.exe -i %INPUT% -t 30 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -genre Ringtone -y %OUTPUT%

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I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!

WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD

1. Email makes big files bigger
   Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
2. You hurt the recipients
   Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
3. You hurt yourself
   By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
4. You hurt the Internet
   All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
5. It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
   You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
   (Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)

HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK

1. public, popular movie
   Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
2. private, ’secret’ movie
   Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (”OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (”788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).

We thank you.

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All these tips come down to the same: get the fastest shutter times possible while keeping the picture quality acceptable.

#1: take the highest ISO your camera can afford

If you can use sensitivity ISO 800 instead of ISO 100, you’ll win 3 stops. This is the difference between a picture at 1/40 sec (sharp) and 1/5 sec (blurry), certainly with moving targets (and tango dancers do move). Of course there is a trade-off: you loose colour detail.

This is the main reason why you’ll need a camera with a decent sensor, or in other words, an dSLR instead of a regular point-and-shoot camera. Even my 350D gets colour defects at ISO800. When they’re too bad, I tend to convert the pictures to black-and-white or somewhere halfway (by decreasing the saturation).

The camera I’m drooling over now, the Canon 5D Mk II, can take decent pictures at ISO 3200. That’s another 2 stops faster.

#2: take the lightest lens you can afford

You need a lens that will let in a lot of light, that allows you to use maximum aperture. Your standard kit lens that goes from f/5 to f/3.5 probably won’t do. You will need a better lens and it will probably cost some money.

I started with a Canon fixed 50mm f/1.8. Contrary to what I said before, this is a cheap lens (about €100). It’s a great portrait lens, but it is hard to get a tango couple from head to toe in a picture, you’d have to step back too far (50mm on a dSLR is slighty ‘tele’). It’s great for abrazo (embrace) pictures of the upper bodies.

For the last Brussels Tango festival, I bought a Sigma fixed 30mm f/1.4. It’s pricier, heavier but it fits the purpose better. The f/1.4 lets in more light (it’s a 1/3 stop ‘faster’ than a f/1.8) and the 30mm lens (which, on a digital SLR that does not have a full-size sensor, is equivalent to a 45mm lens) allows me to fit people full-length into the frame.

The drawback: with wide aperture, the depth-of-field becomes very narrow. This means: you focus on something e.g. 1.55m away, and every thing closer than 1.40m or further than 1.70m is already blurry. While this is also a feature (it’s a great effect for portraits up close), this means that if your autofocus is just slightly off, everything will be blurry. The error margin is very narrow.

#3: choose Av or Tv mode

Obviously you’re not going to use the standard ‘portrait’ or ‘landscape’ mode. You should go for either aperture priority “Av” or shutter priority “Tv” mode. The first one allows you to always use maximum aperture and get the best shutter speed that you can. The second one would make sure that you use reasonable shutter times for moving subjects (like 1/20 or 1/40 sec).

I prefer using “Av” and fixing the aperture on f/1.4. I take risks with that, because sometimes I end up with pictures with shutter times of 1/10 or 1/5 sec, but with some luck and good timing, they come out OK. It’s just my default “gimme all you got” setting. I don’t use “M” Manual Mode because I don’t have the time before each picture to decide how much aperture/shutter I want.

#4: use autofocus on 1 (central) point

Put your autofocus on 1 point, I use the middle of the frame. This is important because you want to control on what part of your frame your camera tries to focus. You have to force yourself to the following sequence: focus, reframe, shoot. The point on which you focus will be one with the most contrast. It might be an upperarm, where the skin and clothing touch, or the face, or some pattern with contrasting colours on the back. People who are fully dressed in plain black (and there are a lot of those in tango) are very hard to auto-focus on. The framing you use to focus and the actual frame you want to shoot will seldom be the same. So you need to reframe right after focusing. You focus by pushing the shutter button halfway and then you keep it pushed like that while you reframe. When the composition is right, you click all the way and the actual picture is taken.

This is the main reason why people unfamiliar with my camera have a hard time taking acceptable pictures with it. They point at a dancing couple, they push the button all the way immediately, the camera focuses on something in between the two dancers -typically a far away wall- and the shot is unsharp.

#5: underexpose and fix it later

If the 4 tips above still don’t make your shutter times acceptable, try using exposure compensation (the AV+/- button). I sometimes use a full stop of underexposure and I correct it in ‘post’. I use the contrast maximisation in Picasa to stretch the histogram again.

Also, in tango venues, there are a lot of spot lights (to make it cosy). If I focus on a dark part and then reframe to something that includes some of those lights, they might end up clipping part of the picture. When I underexpose, this becomes less of a problem.

The drawback of this method is very similar to using high ISO values: it messes up your colours. So in a lot of cases, you might have to make the picture black and white. But if the moment, the composition was valuable, and the shutter speed was just good enough, you can still end up with a really nice picture.

So how much does this all add up to? If you were to take pictures with a compact camera: f/2.8 lens, ISO 100 and shutter time of 1/30 sec, you need a lighting situation of EV 8 (40%). In my situation, a f/1.4 lens, ISO 800 and the same 1/30s shutter allow me to take pictures in a EV 3 (20%) situation a.k.a. “very dark”. I just won 5 stops. With underexposure, I can go lower still, to EV 2. It makes a lot of difference.

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It’s not a bad widget, but it’s too limited. You can only display “Day/Week/Month/Agenda” style, the colors and fonts are fixed and it does funny stuff for events that continue after 12:00AM (which tango events regularly do, believe me).

I’ve already talked about the fact that iCal is a sissy format and that Gcal needs some more features. I was just thinking that it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds (and they got bought by Google, so maybe their idea wasn’t half bad). So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner (since the Calburner/iCalburner domains are taken).

CalendarBurner

• takes any iCal/vCal feed as input -  can also interpret hCalendar and whatever other calendar format might exist (there must be at least 1 XML based format, right?)
• it knows about Gcal, Upcoming, Apple iCal and other hosted calendar applications
• it can ‘explode’ calendars: convert “every Thursday from X Jan to Y July, but not in May” to N individual events. Calendars where each event is non-repeating are easier to process. (E.g. in Google Calendar, a weekly event that goes on until Dec 14th is interpreted as “inclusive” that Dec 14th date. If you feed that iCal feed into PHPiCalendar, it interprets this repeating event as “before” Dec 14th, so it stops at Dec 7th. With an ‘exploded’ calendar, there is no ambiguity)
• It can visualize a calendar as an IFRAME, with a JS widget, through RSS feeds … and every time fully customisable in colors, fonts, links, order …
• Google Calendar has an RSS feed but this shows the events with the date they were created, not when the actual event takes place. It is one way of showing things, but you also need ‘most recent past events’, ‘next 10 events’ …
• It caches calendar info, so that a particular popular calendar does not crash when consulted by too many people.
• it uses easy URLs: /cal/ATS56GE78SH/rss20 and /cal/ATS56GE78SH/js
• it knows about client applications: when fed into Outlook, iCal, Sunbird, … it uses the features of those programs
• it allows for filtering, tagging, merging … (the “Remix” part of my Get/Remix/Deliver proposal)
• it gives you stats on subscribers, clickthrough, popular events …
• it links with Google Maps
• … (any ideas?)

It would really be nice if some innovative company would jump in this void. With an appropriate freemium model I’m sure it would take off and make calendaring an easier task to do.

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• “Turn the beat around - the secret history of disco” by Peter Shapiro
• “Last night a DJ saved my life - the history of the disc jockey” by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

Both speak about a phenomenon of the 60’s-70’s: Northern Soul. It is the unlikely emergence of a subculture of English white working-class youths that only danced to American upbeat soul music. It started in Manchester, the Twisted Wheel club and spread from there.

The original northern soul scene lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and is considered a retrogressive or revivalist movement based on a style of music created years earlier. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, African American artists had moved on to newer genres such as funk, jazz funk and disco, so the northern soul scene relied on a finite supply of 1960s recordings.

This happened around the time I was born, and I was back here in Belgium so the whole movement kind of escaped my attention. Now why is this important? Because the northern soul was an essential part of the birth of the DJ culture, and contributed to genres like acid jazz, and after that deep house, all of which are near to my heart. Some more influences:

DJ Fatboy Slim from Brighton, England has used a number of samples from northern soul recordings in his music e.g. the use of the guitar riff from “Sliced Tomatoes” by The Just Brothers for his “Rockefeller Skank” single

The British pop and rock artist Paul Weller is an aficionado of black-American music and a keen collector of northern soul 45s. Many of his songs have been musically influenced by northern soul, such as “Beat Surrender”, “Town Called Malice”, “Trans-Global Express” and “The Gift” (by The Jam) and “Solid Bond In Your Heart” (by The Style Council).

Sharleen Spiteri, singer/songwriter and member of the British act Texas is a fan of northern soul music. The Texas song “Black-Eyed Boy” uses a classic driving northern soul backbeat and brass sound.

For the promotional video accompanying their single “Familiar Feeling”, British band Moloko featured a highly authentic recreation of Wigan Casino complete with dancers in period fashion. Lead singer Roisin Murphy is also shown attempting northern soul dancing manouvres.
Click here to view the embedded video.

Edwyn Collins (”A Girl Like You”), Simply Red and Scottish group Belle And Sebastian are amongst many other recording artists who have utilised elements of the northern soul sound in their recordings

Duffy’s single Mercy features dancers performing the spins and flips that are commonly associated with northern soul in the video. The song also has a very northern soul sounding feel to it.
Click here to view the embedded video.

 To hear some Northern Soul music, check the jukebox at www.northernsoul.net.

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 Click here to view the embedded video.

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No iPhone, thanks

This is not my first iPod, I think I’m at n° 5. And before you start telling me “the iPod Touch is an iPhone, that can’t be used for calling. Why not buy an iPhone?”. Well, I don’t need a new phone yet, I’m probably gonna buy an iPhone in a year or so, when the GSM providers have reasonable data transfer prices, and there’s the price too: the 8GB iPod is slightly over 200 euro. The iPhone is 525 euro.

Applications

But this baby is really neat. It does music, sure, and video, like the previous one. But it’s got Wifi, a big, smart touch-screen, games, applications, and … From day one I’m using Google Mail (via IMAP), the Weather application, Google Maps. Then I started looking through the free applications on the App Store. So what am I using now:

• Games: Dactyl, Cube Runner, BlueSkiesLite, Sudoku, TapTap
• Stuff: iDoodle2Lite, WhiteNoise, Remote
• Network: AirSharing, Speedtest, IM+, Palringo
• Social networking: Facebook, AroundShare, GooSync, ShoZu, reQall
• Info: BuienRadar

I’ve just started using reQall, a kind of task list + shopping list, which allows you to add via the iPod/iPhone, via the web and via a IM (Gtalk) account. This looks promising.

The games are not bad. Dactyl is strangely addictive, the movement sensors work really well with BlueSkiesLite, … I expect to see some killer iPod/iPhone games in the future.

The only thing I miss now is a good sync with my Google Calendar. iTunes can sync my iPod contacts with Google Mail, but not my calendar. GooSync is supposed to be able to do that, but I can’t get it to work. Of course Apple wants me to use (paid) MobileMe, but I want to see if I can find a free way first.

In any case, I discover a new use every day. It’s … exciting, actually.

Wifi

I had Wifi on my Nokia N91, but I haven’t seen it so well integrated as on this iPod. It saves connection credentials and connects to known networks without asking. Well, the fact that I find this remarkable says more about the user-unfriendliness of the (Nokia) Symbian OS than anything else. But the feeling that you have a small Internet-ready device, that allows you to check email and read web pages comfortably everywhere, is awesome.

User Interface

People who know me, know I’m not the biggest fan of Mac OSX. Don’t try to convince me it’s easy and intuitive, because for me it isn’t. But this iPod Touch is another story. This is the best user interface ever.

You switch it on and it’s there immediately (not when it has to boot, of course, but when it’s just inactive) The screen is sharp and large. Text is easy to read. Images look great. You intuitively tap on a web page when it’s too small, and it zooms in until the paragraph is as wide as your screen. And then you turn the device 90°, your application switches from portrait to landscape and browsing becomes even easier.

The multi-touch screen feels totally intuitive. You flip through your photos by sliding them left and right, you scroll down by just dragging, you zoom in and out with two fingers and it feels like it’s the way things should have been all along. I even catch myself trying the two-finger zoom-in on my TomTom GPS, where it -obviously- does NOT work.

I took the iPod, did not read any manual (duh!) and I figured everything out in, what, 30 seconds? It’s better than the TomTom, and that one was already very good.

Hardware top 3

Apple makes great hardware. The MacBook looks slick and classy, the MacPro looks strong and professional, and this iPod Touch is not only beautiful, it acts likes it’s an extension of your brain, through your fingers.

It just entered my personal top 3 of hardware devices that make my life better. It jumped over the TomTom GPS and sits next to my Canon 350D. If some more killer apps come out, it’s totally gonna take #1.

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Audio/video

• iTunes (+Quicktime): excellent music manager and it rips to MP3 really fast
• CDBurnerXP: for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO files
• Irfanview: image viewer, editor and converter - for people who think Photoshop is overkill
• Picasa: photograph workflow & archive manager (from Google)
• VLC Player: ultimate video player, very complete set of codecs
• ffmpeg with a GUI like GVC: video conversion: AVI, MOV, MPG, MP4, …
• Handbrake: will make a good MPEG4 of any DVD in one go

Internet

• Skype: for chat, phonecalls and SMSes with people far away
• Chrome, Firefox or Opera browser - personally I like Firefox less. Opera is solid and fast, Google Chrome is an interesting new kid on the block.
• FileZilla: FTP client
• Putty: SSH and telnet terminal
• EditPlus: customisable editor for text, HTML, CMD … that also works over FTP
• uTorrent: because sometimes you need to … get stuff, you know

Tools

• Google Pack: contains Picasa, Skype, Google Toolbar and a whole bunch of other useful programs
• Adobe PDF reader: for reading PDF documents, and everything is in PDF these days
• 7-Zip: compression/expansion of ZIP, RAR and 7z archives
• CutePDF with GhostScript: printing to a PDF file (also allows converting a PostScript PS/EPS file to PDF)
• UnixUtils: I’m a sucker for GAWK and WGET
• Nokia PCSuite: for synchro with my Nokia N91 (yes, it’s still my phone!)
• XAMPP: for developing with Apache/PERL/PHP/MySQL on Windows

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Now that’s changing. Amazon is selling digital books on their Kindle device (240.000 devices sold in Aug 2008, 12% of books offered in both digital & analog are sold digital), Sony has a digital book reader (the PRS-505-SC), iRex has the iLiad. There will be more and more books available in digital format, and those will inevitably become a target for piracy.

The Kindle has its own AZW digital eBook format, but this is probably derived from the Mobipocket MOBI/PRC format. Mobipocket was taken over by Amazon in 2005. AZW/PRC support DRM (Digital Rights Management - a.k.a. you can’t read it unless I allow you to) for eBooks. Sony has its own (of course) format which is called BBeB (Broadband eBook), which also has DRM. Most readers also read PDF files.

My guess is, that as more books are being offered in digital format, there will be an increased interest in the DRM secuirty behind the file formats, and hackers will find ways to convert full books to an unencrypted format. This might be PDF or PRC/MOBI. And these files will be exchanged in the same way as we some people exchange music and movies. You will have a tab “eBooks” on thepiratebay, and youngsters will say “I have all Steven King’s books - downloaded of course, duh!” My guess is also that publishers will start blaming Amazon, and start suing their own customers, like the RIAA and MPAA are still doing. And it will take years for them to figure out that DRM is not a good thing, that it is possible to make money by selling things that can be copied. And they’ll probably arrive at conclusions that Seth Godin has been talking about for years already now.

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Fleshmap via Infosthetics

If you ever wanted proof that hip-hop & rap are a disruptive music genre, take a look at this study/art work by Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg & the crowdsourcing specialists at Dolores Labs: Fleshlabs.

They’ve take the lyrics of a lot of songs and figured out which body parts are most mentioned.

Based on a compilation of more than 10,000 songs, the piece visualizes the use of words representing body parts in popular culture. Each musical genre exhibits its own characteristic set of words, with more frequently used terms showing up as bigger images. The entrance image shows how many times different body parts are mentioned; the charts for each genre go into more detail, showing the usage of different synonyms for each part.

For most genres the #1 bodypart is the eyes, for some others it’s the hands. There’s only one exception: for hip-hop, it’s all about the booty. Their vocabulary is like no other genre. They even have the male reproductive organ as #6, whereas -this might surprise you- it is *never* mentioned in gospel or jazz music. If you add the numbers for the same organ in a slightly more enthusiastic state, and those for the nearby dual reproductive production units, the total is on the same level as ‘face’.

We might think this is a recent MTV-ish development, but may I recall you the lyrics of Rapper’s Delight (1979) - one of the first hip-hop hits:

he may be able to fly all through the night
but can he rock a party til the early light
he cant satisfy you with his little worm
but i can bust you out with my super sperm
i go do it, i go do it, i go do it, do it , do it

 Which was Big Bank Hank talking to Lois Lane about Superman. 1979, folks, and they did censor one thing: the ‘damn’ in ‘I didn’t even bite and not a god d–m word ‘.

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