This album came out of left-field and hit me like a brick wall.
A surprising and beautiful new album by Daniela and Ben Spektor, after a promising debut by Daniela last year. Deep and moving, “Love is” is a brilliant combination of Daniela’s sweet vocals and folk acoustics with Ben’s ambient electronic harmonies. The result is an engaging reflection on love and partnership, packed with hypnotic patterns of electro-pop rhythms and dance beats.
Its a rare event having an album where each song is competing for the “best one”. The first single released to the radio is “Cut it out” – but each of the other tracks is as good.
The sound of this album does not give any hint to the fact that the two live in Israel – this could have been easily a Seattle or a London production. Ranging from the acoustic vocals in “Home” that are almost taken from a Mohave 3 or Mazzy Star album, to the metallic dance beats in the track “Love is”, which sound to me like a love song the Cylon babes in Battlestar Gallactica would dance to.
“Love is” is distributed through BandCamp.com (and iLoveMusic.co.il in Hebrew). It was quite refreshing to see a site that makes is easy for artists selling their music directly to fans, with no fat labels getting in the way. BandCamp takes 15% of the revenue, and all the rest goes directly to the artist. This is a much better deal than the 30% taken by iTunes or Amazon (as far as I remember).
On top of that, the buyer can specify how much he is willing to pay. “Pay what you want” is a disruptive model, pioneered by Radiohead long ago (and later abandoned). Daniela and Ben set the minimum price to 25 NIS (~$7) – but this album deserves much, much more.
Ariel
I just love the Super-Bowl commercials. Those expensive, uber-produced, work-for-months type of commercials.
Here are my best picks.
1. Motorola Xoom – Empower The People
Motorola achieved greatness with this ad, that stabs at Apple using Apple’s own 1984 commercial concept – just in reverse: Guess who is the totalitarian regime now?
Smart, superbly done, subtle, emotional and captivating.
Just heard this song for the first time today… Awwww!
I think I am listening to it in a loop for the 17th time now. The drumwork is just fabulous.
After I learned that this song is from 2005, it dawned on me that I lived under a rock for the past few years. So I just went and bought 13 other Moby songs in iTunes.
Lift me up, lift me up Oh la la la la
Ariel
“Killing two birds with one stone” should be replaced with something more relevant to modern times like “Killing two pigs with one bird”
Here is a great article! It would make you much smarter! CLICK NOW!
Really, its a good read! and it will not damage your windows as much!
Or how about those great links – would you click any of those? They are highly recommended!
http://5z8.info/getPersonalData-start_p6m3w__init_download
http://5z8.info/worm.exe_z6o2f_-php-deactivate_phishing_filter-48-
(Maybe – the last one actually looks promising).
If those links look suspicious to you, why are you clicking links that look like this?
Do you know where they lead you to?
As you could see if you followed the very first link above, the Wikipedia entry for URL shorteners has plenty of pros, but enough cons to counter them. My number one is that the obscurity of the URLs makes them dangerous as it removes a layer of sanity checking that you go through when you are about to click links. Also, they are widely used by spammers and phishers as they easily negate one of the basic features of spam filtering – scanning URLs against blacklisted sites and terms, so they are quickly becoming the phishers holy grail. Not to mention the fact that those links are at the mercy of an intermediate service provider, which might be temporarily down or simply out of business, and then you are stuck with a bunch of dead links that you can not even reverse-engineer on Google.
The explosion of URL shorteners brought to you by the likes of Twitter ( http://5z8.info/backyard-fireworks-disasters_y1t6m_this_persons_account_has_been_hacked ) was driven by technical constraints (like the legacy limitation of 140 characters due to SMS message size), but instead of limiting the usage to the edge case of SMS (or actually doing something to fix, or better, retire the SMS system) we embraced this as a godsend. The shortened URLs are all around.
This brilliant service, ShadyURL, illustrates those points in the best way possible (I don’t think they intended to, though).
Stop creating shortened URLs, period. Its bad for us. And when you get a shortened URL in your Twitter or email, be very careful when you follow it. Lastly, if you want to spread this awareness further, use ShadyURL to send links around.
And by the way – the above links are some of the mildest and least offensive ones I could generate – I am suspecting that most of the URLs won’t pass your basic spam filter.
Just returned from 2012. Nothing much to say about that – quite tiring dialogs and super melodramatic overacting, but definitely still carries some memorable moments in movie imagery – like the destruction of Las-Vegas (first in movie history if I am not mistaken), and many others. It’s a very Californian movie – many inside jokes that are funny in California. The only notable actor in the whole set is only Woody Harrelson (Natural Born Killers, A Scanner Darkly), playing a crazy conspiracy-theorist hippie broadcasting the end of the world. Awesome and funny performance.
Anyway, as always lots of goodies before the movie…
Here is a great ad. Listen to the sound effects, this is pure nostalgia (Steve Austin anyone?)
As for trailers, I had fun figuring out which video game this movie trailer is based on.
Lastly, this is the first time I see a full trailer for Avatar, which is arguably the most hyped movie of the year. Expected Dec 18 – I hope its interesting as the trailer is.
A few months ago I “upgraded” Office on my Windows laptop at work to Office 2007. I know, I was using the older version for too long – but it was working fine, till it stopped.
A few months after the switch, I still can not figure out the disastrous Office 2007 user-interface changes. This is a huge step backwards in productivity for me. I keep staring at the huge buttons – 100 pixels tall of wasted space across the entire top section, in all office applications, the strange ribbon (what was wrong with the single line customizable toolbar?), and the unintuitive office button at the top that hides all the useful stuff – it all seems like a move designed to give a sense of “need” to the Office suite, without a real benefit to the user. It clearly seems like Microsoft was trying to desperately make it look much different, in the false pretense that “different” == “improved”. Not so.
This week I actually stopped using word on Windows and moved to WordPad just because of the slow speed and bloated and useless user interface. I know its way too simplistic, but you know what? For editing RTF files, with some headers and fonts, you don’t need more then that.
Surprisingly for me, the Office 2008 suite on the Mac is actually one of the most polished, fast and beautiful applications I have ever seen from Microsoft. Not only it is on par with every other Mac application in terms of sleek-factor, fast-loading and intuitive to use, the user interface stayed true to the original menu paradigm throughout the lasts years, and did not change for the worse as in the Windows version. My guess this is due to the strict UI guidelines developers respect in the Mac application world.
On top of that, its elegant and beautiful. There are many small touches that are hard to notice without a careful one to one comparison – like the nice shading in the active cell in Excel, the beautiful fonts in all applications, or the more useful page layout in Excel. The Mac version of Excel is becoming one of my favorite applications on the Mac.
My suggestion for all the Office power users – try Office on a Mac. You will not believe this is a Microsoft product.
That’s it, it has been said at last.
Here is a statement by Microsoft’s partner group manager, Simon Aldous:
“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics”
Isn’t it awesome and refreshing?
The following statement is out in the wild now, and there is no going back – in spite of Microsoft’s cruel response (To Mr. Aldous, that is).
Dear Mircosoft: Its OK to take the best and most useful ideals from your competitors, and build upon them. Its OK to praise a competitor on some aspects of their product, while still claiming that your product is better in other ways. But no, Mircosoft, it is NOT OK to lie, and it is NOT OK to throw one of your loyal managers at the dogs.
Also – I am sorry to be the one that tell you this, but we, the simple users, are not dumb. At the end of the day, every one of us decides if they want to use your products on their merits and our convenience. So please continue to improve Windows, make it nicer and easier to use. You can even try to innovate, as you are doing with the Surface. Just don’t lie to me.
Anyone that uses more than one computer would stumble pretty soon on the issue of syncing files between them. Especially when you try to be organized – you need your documents, media, configuration, and basically, life – available on every machine you frequent.
Of course, many people opt on the new philosophy, Living in the Cloud. Every day now it becomes easier then yesterday to have all of your data in the cloud: GMail, Google Docs, Pandora, Hulu, you name it. This method works fine most of the time.
Personally that is not how I want my life to be. There are many issues with keeping your data elsewhere – no internet connection, or provider server down (happens to all, even the mighty G). Being locked out of your data is a scary proposition, and for me not an option.
I opt on the other approach – keep my data local, but automatically replicate it across all of the my machines. This allows for immediate access to the data, plus the non-obvious but huge benefit of backup and automatic restore – in case of a catastrophe on one or more of your machines, your most important data is already backed up everywhere.
In the past I used Folder Share, that became Windows Live Sync once they were bought by Microsoft. I stopped using it once the application chocked on a folder containing more than 10K files. Also, the way to configure it is quite crude, where you have to login to the website, add machines, add folders, define permissions and connect them together. Arggh.
Enter DropBox. This is by far the simplest, hassle-free, most automatic and smart solution to folder syncing. It just works.
With DropBox you create a folder that is automatically synced to their server as you change it. Then, when another computer installs DropBox and uses the same dropbox account, its DropBox folder gets synced with any changes from the server. From this point on both folders continuously replicate each other.
It could not get any simpler then that.
There are many amazing little things this little service does so well. For instance, when you add or change a file, the file icon has a small sticker that shows its syncing, that changes to a green check-mark when its done. Of course, on all platforms you get a small floating notification once all files were synced to your current machine. Another thing: If you happen to work on the same file at once on both machines, you get a collision notification for you to decide which version to keep.
I use a Mac at home, a Linux workstation at work and a Windows laptop in between. DropBox works seamlessly on all operating systems, and its quite amazing to see your new note created on Windows, edited on Linux and immediately viewed on your Mac.
Did I mention its free?
I use it for several specific features:
The iPhone app is out for a few months, and its another neat way to get to your data on the go. Sadly it is read-only, which means you can not add or change a file. If they would enable text file editing through the app, DropBox will become the killer note-taking app on the iPhone, as nothing can beat editing a note and having it immediately available on all of your machines.
Usually I tend to shun free services, but the business model is to hook you enough so you will need more than the free 2 GB provided in the free account. A 50GB package costs $10 per month, and 100GB for $20. This seems like a fair price to me for such a huge feature, and its clear that somewhere down the path I will have more than 2GB of data to sync…
All the best, DropBox: Keep up the good work. I wish that more applications would be like that – elegant, simple and just working.
My name is Ariel Bloch. Software developer, father, gamer, dungeon master, illustrator, photographer and thinker.
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