I haven’t been listening to a terribly huge amount of music this week, but I suppose if any I’ve listened to the Wolfmother album a few times. I bought it last year after hearing the band briefly at T in the Park, then hearing it in Fopp playing, where I decided I should buy it. Since then I went to see them at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh and am currently wearing a Wolfmother t-shirt…

The album is great, totally reminiscent of classic rock, but brilliant and original. Its rather heavy at times, but you should love it!

I have previously mentioned here that Fopp is an absolutely briallint chain of stores. Unfortunately, it has now demised. At least I was in one of the stores an hour before it finally closed. This really is sad I shall now have to boycott HMV and Virgin even more as they, obviously much worse, deserve to demise more spectacularly than Fopp. At least HMV’s profits have halved the past year!

BBC NEWS | Business | Fopp closes down its 105 stores

I have finally finished at school… for good! Last week I had my last week, and yesterday there was the exhibition, pretty much a prizegiving. Pretty odd to finally finish, but to be honest it hasn’t really sunk in all that much that I’ll never see half these people again! Oh well…

Was out partaying all of this last week, so that’s probably why I haven’t had all that much time. But its the holidays now so I have lots and lots of time to do various things that may interest me on the spur of a moment…

Am going to Europe later this summer for a few weeks with friends… Paris for roughly a week, then Nice and finally Madrid. This should hopefully pretty fun packed and full of adventure! YAY!

Will be starting my new job in Selex in Edinburgh for a year in September, then going to university (which one depends on my results) in Autumn 2008… Seems a very long time away, but strangely enough it should pass fairly quickly…

Meanwhile I can’t wait till my results, I’m rather anxious actually, although that’s hardly a meanwhile kinda comment to make as it happens after a lot of the things I’m doing.

T in the Park next weekend should be great fun! As will the the Chili’s in late August!

Although I’ve been listening to lots of other random stuff this past week, especially The Mars Volta - Francis The Mute and Muse - Inspirations, I’d thought I should recommend Harvest as it is a properly brilliant album! It sounds a lot more country than some of the other Neil Young albums I’ve listend to, but it definitely has the characteristic Neil Young sound. I enjoy every song on the album, but especially Heart Of Gold and Out On The Weekend. Have fun!

As i said briefly in the previous post, I got round to testing out how my project involving the Arduino drum kit was going so far. I finished the soldering of all of the wires onto the sensor modules that I had created. This took quite a while, especially with the stupidly long lengths of wire that I went with in the end… oops!

I attached all of the sensors to the kit using electricians tape, you know, the plasticy kind. This can be seen in some of the photos below.


I did have a fair amount of trouble getting some of the sensors to stick. Particularly on my snare - the tape didn’t seem to like the Remo Coated Ambassador head, so I used regular clear tape and stuck it to the resonant head which seemed to work just as well and not get in the way! (I’ll get a picture later). The cymbals also weren’t particualrly fond of having tape stuck to them. As you could imagine, it dampened the sound quite a lot, making them sound crap, even more rubbish than usual! The tape didn’t really want to stick to the metal surface very well either, but as it was just a test run, I left it there.

I had it all set up over two breadboards, one for all of the incoming analogue connections, and the other for the midi port and any other things that I wished to add later. It just made setting up slightly easier as it was clear where everything was going. There were a hell of a lot of wires as I mentioned, so I will be investing in cable ties later to keep the +/- together. It was also fairly important to make sure the wires were colour coded to aid the setting up process.

The midi port output from the Arduino was sent thru a USB -> Midi adaptor or Midi -> USB adaptor, you can call it what you want! This was connected to my iMac where I used Logic Express and Battery to check that it was all working to some extent and then assign sounds to the specific notes generated by the kit.

This worked well, although the resonance of the drum heads combined with the ‘ringing’ effect of the piezo caused multiple signals to be generated. This probably is a major thing to work on, but I think it should be fixable by working out a higher ‘trigger’ voltage or getting the Arduino to somehow ignore the two resulting (combined) cosine waves that result from the ringing of the piezo and the vibrating of the drum head. The cymbals turned out to be worse in this aspect as they vibrated more, but a way of (more) dampening could be found…

The next thing that I’ll probably get round to is either working out how to counter what I will call the ‘ringing effect’ or adding a footswitch to trigger the bass drum and/or the hit hat foot pedal. I had originally bought a decent foot switch from Maplin for a fair amount of money to see how it would work, but I have currently lost it… Once I have sorted out the general ringing I will be able to input into Sibelius, to get the sheet music to be notated in real time, how cool! For the moment though, I am overly impressed in how well it is going!

Having just done an exam today, and only having 2 more to go… I finished the soldering (for now at least) on the Arduino Midi Drum Kit that I’m building, and hooked it up to see how it went. Other than a few minor issues I was incredibly surrprised at how well it went. I took some photos, and when I’m not so tired I’ll post them tomorrow!

I happened to stumble upon this great company - Surrealien - that makes custom but rather trippy wallpaper. Have a look:-

You give them the dimensions of the room and any objects on the wall such as light fixtures or doorframes etc. and they will create wallpaper that ‘bends’ around these objects and almost involves them in the picture! How cool!

I’ve been having the “Album Of The Week” thing going for about 3 weeks now without too much mention of the albums that are there. Ideally, the idea of having an album of a week picture/section is that I do not have to have an explanation everytime that I want to mention why an album is good/recommend it. But I thought I should at least mention why I think it is good.

The first week I had it up, the album was the new Maroon 5 album - It Won’t Be Soon Before Long. When Songs About Jane came out back in around 2004, I thought it was brilliant, with the catchy tunes but with a hint of jazz, especially with Sunday Morning. There were other great songs on the album too, in a variety of different styles and almost different genres. But overall it was a really listenable experience.

When I heard that they were releasing a new album, I was incredibly happy. Although, after listening to it, it is clear that they have changed their style and no longer have such a what I like to call a ‘unique freshness’ where the songs on the album sound fairly different from each other, yet go really well when played one after another, making the listener refreshened after each song as they are not hearing the same thing over and over again! There is less of this on the new album in that the album is very 80s based, especially with the characteristic beats throughout. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. It makes the overall album a lot more lively in a ‘Get up and jump’ sort of way. It didn’t stop me from getting into it though, and as a result it was recommended as the album of the week. Have a listen and enjoy!

The second week I recommended John Mayer’s album - Continuum. This is a truly outstanding piece of work that deserves all of the Grammy’s that it received. It is incredibly blues orientated which is a great thing, yet also at the same time it sounds ‘modern,’ something which blues based albums sometimes struggle with nowadays. The modern aspect is clearly due to his recent transition from his more pop-like style of music, but seeing as I haven’t really heard any of that, I shall and wait and hear it before I comment. The sound he produces turns out to be really mellow and easy to listen/chill/revise to. These days (meaning the few months around May/June) I like music that you can listen to whilst revising, as that is what I spend a fair amount of time doing… Back to John Mayer, he is an excellent guitarist, lyricist and singer, all of which are demonstrated in depth throughout the album. I will not be hesitant in exploring any more of his music, especially his live blues album - Try! with the John Mayer Trio!

Finally I’ll get to this weeks album - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Recently I’ve have been getting into a certain Mr. Young. I’ve read in places that this album was really easy to get into, which is definitely is, but nevertheless I listened to Harvest Moon a fair amount before this. To me, this is a really great album where the musicians are just having so much fun, and jamming at pretty much every oppurtune moment. The backing vocals at the chorus, in a really Neil Young or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sort of way in Down By The River are just brilliant, as is the huge jam in Cowgirl In The Sand. In fact the whole album is great fun to listen to and as a result, it comes highly recommended!

I’ve been using Flock for about a month now and I’ve come to realise a few things about it. I shall sum it up in some basic points…

Good things:

Its fast at loading pages
Its fast at opening
It looks rather elegant - different from Safari, but the social bookmarking features are useful (not that I make great use of the social aspect of them!)
It works with pretty much every page I’ve tried it with
The searching of the text on recent pages with the searchbar at the top of the browser window is incredibly useful

Bad Things:

Test boxes are a pain, sometimes the cursor does not want to appear, sometimes it appears more than once. Other times, it is impossible to highlight words.
The search bar is a bother when trying to highlight more than one word at once by double/triple clicking. When highlighting, it rarely works either!
The lack of in browser pdf viewing is tiresome. There’s probably a plugin but that requires effort to find it.
The only plugin I’ve tried (to restore tabs) kept becoming unresponsive with Flock giving me a bloody warning every once in a while.
Tabs, let alone pages do not restore after quitting (They do in FF2!)
The download window doesn’t remember what you Apps you chose to open certain file types, .torrents in particular!
The blog writing bit formats your text wierdly, making it a slightly different style and size to the WordPress default.
The browser window occasionally wants to place itself in front of everything else… even the dock and menubar. This can only be sorted thru quitting and reopening the app. This seems to have been sorted with the most recent update

Other than these small minor things, which I will hopefully update if I find any more quibbles/problems/glitches, I think Flock is great.

The only thing preventing me using it more is that Safari 3 Beta has just be released.

Added a nice new feature… Album of the week!

Basically the album which i listen to the most during a weeklyish basis! Strange, could have possibly guessed it from the name!

Click on it and you go to iTunes (UK) to get it.

While I’m at it… Continuum is an awesome album!