Category: Geek

77 Million Paintings

Brian Eno, Light Painter:

The multidisciplinary artist, with the help of a few technical experts, has created a computer program that continually fuses his translucent light paintings to create an ever-evolving artistic display on your computer screen. The piece is accompanied by a randomly assembled ambient track that’s never the same twice. The program is capable of creating about 77 million permutations of Eno’s visual work and is titled, appropriately, “77 Million Paintings.”

As Duncan put it: Art or Screen Saver?

Discography Reloaded

Hurrah! The discography pages are now running on WordPress as is just about everything else on this site! I bet you’re just as excited as i am! What it means:

  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.
  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.
  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.
  • All reviews have been preserved in all their eloquent glory.
  • Search is once again available.
  • A new star rating system which is so cool, you have to try it!
  • Old ratings have been, um, deleted.
  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.

I still need to figure out how to display most recent reviews to the right here on Hot Poop — but none of you guys actually ever noticed that feature anyway, now did you?

Feeds, Spam & Hard Drives

  • The RSS feed for this site is now handled through FeedBurner. The transition should not be noticeable for you feed-readers out there though (which is actually what this entry’s testing).
  • With the upgrade to WordPress’s latest version, a new spam-filter has been installed which might cause a tiny delay when you hit the “post comment” button. When that happens, there’s no need to hit it again — just wait for the page to refresh. If your comment doesn’t appear at all it’s most probably been flagged and awaiting moderation.
  • Further testing of the POS intel iMac indicates the hard drive has indeed Bitten The Big One. Special thanks to KUR-reader and Mac-o-phile Scott Finney who’s been of great help over the weekend. His resolve to try and rescue at least some of the files has left us with one last straw to cling on to (more on that later, perhaps!)…

Tiny Music Makers

Music Thing has a great series of posts up on “tiny music makers”, the people responsible for the sound of your Mac/Windows OS starting up, the “Intel Inside” tune, and more.
Brian Eno who composed the Windows 95 tune:

The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.’

Fun With GoogleTrends

The geeks at Google have released a new toy: Google Trends. It allows you to look up the popularity of searchterms over the years, but the real fun lies in the fact that you can compare searchterm popularity of different phrases using comma’s. Here’s a couple:
– yin vs. yang
– the vs. and
– pro vs. con
– and my personal favorite: weapons of mass distruction vs. enron. :)

I’ll See Your * And Raise You A *

As you probablee know English isn’t my mother tongue, so when writing up a comment here, I did the following search on Google to verify the accuracy of the term I was about to use:
search?q=”i’ll see your” “and raise you a”
A random pick of what people “see” and “raise you”:

  • dead pigeon/piece of yarn
  • waitress/pair of comfortable shoes
  • Gender Essentialism/Social Construction
  • Values/Girl Scout Cookie
  • namedropping/hairstylist
  • Karl Rove/Dick Durbin
  • Mary Tyler Moore/Sophia Loren

Right. That’s enough coffee for you Barry.

Spamnesty International

Via Tom, a novel idea: Spamnesty International.

We care about spam because spam is really important for your life! If spam would stop today, the world would end. We fight for a more evenly distribution of spam to everybody in the whole world.

To make money selling T-shirts with spam-messages on them: clever or lame? They’re with the good guys though as 25% of all profits are donated to Amnesty International.

iTunes Sig

‘t is a thing of wonder, the iTunes Signature Maker:

iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.

As for mine? Have a listen, see if you recognize some tunes. ;)

Tap That Song

And another fun diversion: Song Tapper! Use your keyboard’s spacebar to tap the (lyrical) rhythm of a song, and have the site guess that song. Amazingly accurate, I might add — I tapped “Close To You” by B. Bacharach and the site got it right from the first time (as you might’ve guessed, tapping “The Black Page” will not return any results).