Links and things

Super Mario in 14kB Javascript
That pretty much sums it up: someone has recreated (some of) Super Mario Bros in a very small amount of JavaScript. Amazing.

Radiohead on vinyl

As a fairly avid Radiohead fan, while most people were downloading In Rainbows for a few pence, I bought the £40 discbox release. After a month's spent listening to the MP3s, I finally got my hands on the discbox this week which contains an additional CD, lyrics, artwork and the standard In Rainbows album on vinyl.In my teens and through university I went through a period of buying vinyl if I possibly could. My collection doesn't extend far beyond a few DJ Krush and DJ Shadow albums and I haven't bought anything new for several years, until the In Rainbows discbox arrived. I literally blew the dust off my Dual turntable (once I had moved our 3ft plastic Christmas tree which was sat on top), fiddled around with the phono and earth cables, found the power adapter, pulled out one of the Radiohead 45s and turned the volume up very high.My Dual is not great and could do with a new cartridge and Thom Yorke may have been sped up a little but the sound blew me away once again. Its incredible that a needle tracking the bumps in a piece of plastic can produce such a warm and accurate recreation of the original recording. The whole album sounded larger somehow with a much wider sound stage and the beautiful finale Videotape sounded especially rich and delicate.

I'm no purist but listening to vinyl does make you realise that the digital era comes with some very significant compromises. I'm not about to ditch my AAC collection and having my whole music collection in my pocket is quite incredible but I certainly won't be letting the dust gather so much from now on.

Links and things

Paul Sandoz from Sun writes an interesting post about the RESTful-ness of our BBC Schedule API
I've never claimed to understand all the ins and outs of REST, perhaps now is the time to try..?

iTunes is offering Global Underground's Afterhours Ibiza for £7.99
Not only is that a tenner cheaper than on the high street but you also get an extra 15 tracks... bargain. I've got about half way and its pretty awesome so far.

Playing with Nabaztag

We've had a Nabatag bunny sitting in front of us for a few months and a couple of weeks ago it founds its way into a project we built as part of a physical prototyping workshop. As Tristan wrote, we used Randolf (our bunny) as the face of our Zoltar Bunny music predictor. By swiping objects across a special plate (read: RFID reader), Zoltar would recommend you music (read: query Last.fm's AudioScrobbler API). The result made its way onto the Nabaztag blog.

Nabaztag are also sponsoring this weekend's Hackday London. I'm am currently putting the slides together for our presentation. Any suggestions for appropriate album covers...? :-)

Numbers. numbers

I seem to have acquired an unhealthy infatuation with numbers. More specifically, numbers representing my experience in Xbox 360 gaming and the number of songs I've listened to and posted to Last.fm.

Sure, these numbers are simply a very quick representation of more significant information - which games I have played, to what level, how many people I've killed in multiplayer, my favourite albums, my favourite artist - but I find myself skewing the data they are attempting to represent by attempting to increase them.

Last.fm has a number of plug-ins and a more or less functional API which allows me to record my listening habits. Unfortunately these just don't seem to work that well - especially recording my iPod listening - and I have felt it necessary to let iTunes sit playing to itself so my listening doesn't go to waste. The aim of Last.fm is to provide a social network around listening habits and to suggest related artists. May be my infatuation is a good thing because the more information they have, the better my recommendations will be. I can keep telling myself that at least.

So this led me to think, do I want to listen to music if I'm not credited? I need a widget which posts songs to your Last.fm account as I listen to the radio....

My desire to improve my Xbox Live Gamerscore has resulted in my joining SwapGame, a video game rental service. My intention is to rent games I can blast through and accrue some lovely Achievements. Most of the 10 day free trial ran out before I finally received my first rental but if I can get through a couple of games a month I think its easier and cheaper than buying games new and sticking them on eBay once I'm done with them. Perhaps I could work out how much my Achievements have cost me, that might put an end to my bad habit.