The first track of Amoral Mayor Earwig EP, how a hot air balloon works, starts out straightforwardly enough. Some quiet acoustic guitar plucks, repeating and slowly adding some more layers of guitar. Sure, there’s some digital delay but mostly it’s just guitar. Some bitcrushing distortion eases into the left speaker just enough to raise an eyebrow, but it keeps with the guitar thing. Oh nice, some drums. Maybe even live. Strange processed guitar in the background, almost voice-like. A single reversed cymbal, very quick. Drum break. Quite distorted. Wait, how did we end up here? By the time the second track, i saw two of me, starts our hot air balloon has caught the jet stream. No turning back now.

Amoral Mayor Earwig EP and Bishop-Whitney EP could be two sides of a single album. I tend to listen to these together. El Hacedor is perhaps a little more mysterious, a little mellower. All three are intriguing and highly enjoyable.

Links

Beak on MySpace (bonus downloadable track, Limozeen)

This is part of a series of netlabel reviews.

Yuki Yaki’s blurb for Heavy Weights has this fanciful description: The tracks will take you on a dive cruise, each of them has its own little valley and its own moon. So: Take your time. This is exactly how I feel about it. The underwater aspect is suggested by the cover, which looks like a Shogun trilobite, and continues through the tracks with glossy, undulating textures. When this album starts I feel like I’m returning to a space that has continued to exist in my absence.

A couple of months after finding Heavy Weights, Vate (released on the 1 bit wonder netlabel) popped up in the archive.org feed. I literally cheered when I saw that there was more Glander to experience. Vate shows how dialed in to his technique Glander is, without at all being formulaic. The same masterful use of repetition is there but there’s a slightly grittier edge to the textures, and I almost get the sense that the camera has a wider angle lens, as bizarre as that is to say about music. These tracks are funkier, too. For instance, listen to the syncopation in the second track, Hmbrg, or the staccato gurgles in Drift. While Heavy Weights is a deep sea dive, Vate is a swooping flight through an urban landscape.

I’m still trying to understand why Glander’s use of repetition is so satisfying. On closer listening, the repeating textures are actually continually varying in small ways, and the different layers flow in and out of the foreground, creating complex interactions. There’s also a constant, but subtle, change in the surrounding space. Sometimes the textures will echo, and then it’s like they come close to you and have a very focused feel, and then drift outward into a cavernous space. There will be long stretches where you might not have noticed even that there were no drums, and then the kick will return at just the right moment.

Both of these albums, along with the bonus tracks available on Glander’s site, reward close listening as well as zoning out and using as background to working and working out.

Links

Glander (download individual tracks that have been on various compilations)

This is part of a series of netlabel reviews.

Homer Everyday

I knew this was a parody of some something but I didn’t know what. Today while eating lunch I was goofing off, clicking on random videos on the YouTube main page and stumbled upon the parody-ee:

This is a timelapse video of this guy’s (Noah Kalina) life, one photo per day for six years. The music was composed for the video by Carly Comando, which, combined with the dedication of doing this for six years, takes the YouTube meme thing to a whole new level. Incidentally, check out Noah’s photography portfolio. Really interesting, surreal use of lighting, often in mundane spaces (which adds to the surrealism).

Speaking of surreal, I wonder what it’s like to have one’s concept immortalized by Homer Simpson.

After years of my photo gallery on this site having a completely different look, I’ve finally integrated it with the theme of this blog (oh-so-cleverly named Nightcappuccino). Thanks to some hard work by Billy Bullock, who ported the k2 theme to Coppermine, it just took a few tweaks to get it to look right. I put just in quotes because it took me most of the afternoon to get it to look right, but that’s no fault of Billy’s. This is just very tweaky work. And sometimes I wonder if I should stop fighting with the trend and move over to flickr. But for now I like having more control over how my photos are presented.

I’m still trying figure out what to do with the main proppe.org page. I have half a mind to just redirect it to this blog page. Or do I just have half a mind?

Now I just need to start shooting again and add some more photos.

Update: Now there’s an RSS feed of the last 10 image uploads.

Homeosis Slideshow

This is the way of Indie Mac development. Create a tool that either does something (one thing) new or does something old in a new, easier way. Make it beautiful and fun to use. Take advantage of the APIs Apple provides, like Core Animation. Make a slick web site with a forum, blog, and user-contributed content, put a screen cast showing how cool the app is, provide a demo and charge a reasonable price for the full version. Finally, create a silly, punny company name. Like atebits. Heh.

via tuaw

Konterkonzept EP

According to Lagerfeld, “it was created by exclusively using hardware synthesizers to set a counterpoint to the prevailing approaches of laptop and software.” He seems to be onto something. This stuff just crackles with energy from the first few seconds and carries through to the end.

While the requisite minimal techno repetition is there, it exists simply to lull you while subtle surprises slink in and out of auditory view. Lagerfeld knows how to take his time and explore an idea, and then move into territories that at first are unexpected, then seem inevitable. This is true of the structure as well as the sound design.

Note: for some reason archive.org’s stream of this EP is playing back at a slower speed. Preview this one from the mp3 downloads instead.

The older icon style hasn’t been nixed yet, as seen in this screenshot of console’s toolbar, but it clearly the emphasis is on the flat, 2D, black and white symbols (see also the new standard folder icons).

Apple has been making an effort to make it easier for developers to integrate the Mac’s new look and feel. For instance Leopard introduces image templates. Developers now have access to a whole bunch of standard images for their apps’ buttons. These are available from the Media tab in Interface Builder 3.0’s Library. It’s a snap to find the appropriate image for standard icons and drag it to your button. No more digging through Safari’s app bundle and scavenging button icons, wondering if you’ll get a nastygram from Apple some day for stealing their graphics.

Here’s the new Library in Interface Builder, showing some of the icons in the Media tab.

But, there are bound to be times when you need to make a custom icon for a button. The recommended way to do this for these kinds of button icons is by creating it with a vector app like Illustrator or InkScape and saving it as a PDF. This way they will be ready for resolution independence (bitmaps can also be used but make sure to create them much larger than you think you’ll need).

Here I’ve added an icon for a stop button as a pdf file to my Xcode project. Interface Builder automatically picks up this addition and shows it in the Media tab of the Library floater in the project’s library (the Xcode project is named TemplateImageButtons.xcodeproj). A note about the pdf you create: the document’s dimensions determine the border around the image in the button.

Here’s a simple transport using the custom stop icon and the system-supplied NSRightFacingTriangleTemplate for the play button. Easy! We’re done. Wait. Something’s not quite right. Notice how the play button has a subtle grey tint to it, while the stop button is infinite black, like the monolith in 2001. When I first saw this I thought maybe the system supplied template images had some kind of tint built into them. But it turns out NSImage can be told that any image is a template and as long as it meets certain criteria, it’ll automatically add tinting as needed. The secret is making sure the image’s filename ends with Template. Renaming the stop icon pdf from TransportStopIcon.pdf to TransportStopIconTemplate.pdf is all it takes. The easiest way to do that is to contextual-click on the pdf file reference in the Xcode project and choose Rename. Interface Builder will get informed of the change, and Xcode will issue the proper SCM commands as well. This is newly minted stuff in IB, so some things are a tad clunky. For instance, you’ll need to drag your renamed icon onto the button again to get the change to stick. Also, I’ve noticed that IB sometimes shows missing image icons when I close the document and open it again.

Much better! Beyond simple tinting, the system will also create an embossed version of your template images for other button types, and create that blue glow around it for the active state of a button (for example, the View/Hide Mini-month button in iCal).

One caveat to this image template system is it expects the image to be black with a clear mask. I ran into this when trying to use a red circle graphic as an image template for a record button. It was converted to a medium grey image by NSImage. I’m looking into whether you can tell a template image to draw as a color but I think in this case I’ll have to create the various button state versions of the circle graphic manually.

I noticed a trend at WWDC this year of Apple adding more things like this to make developers’ lives easier. Although there were some poorly handled transitions (*cough* dropping Carbon 64-bit *cough*), this is one area I’m very glad to see Apple focus on.

More information:
http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html
NSImage Class Reference

Slowly, over the course of a couple of summers, I started to get a feel for it. I’d be just about ready to give up and then get a taste for what it could be like: a 30 second rush of pure adrenaline as the board whipped forward, followed by the inevitable uncoordinated plunge. This is exactly the kind of random reward our brains seem wired to get addicted to: it’s how slot machine operators make all their money on late night gamblers. Only this was outdoors and only resulted in sore muscles, not an empty bank account and baggy eyes. That electrifying half-minute was enough for me to pull myself back on the board and start uphauling the sail once again. My focus was so intense that I wouldn’t notice until that evening the cuts and bruises on my feet and knees from my clumsy attempts to get on the board as quickly as possible. Eventually those bursts would extend to minutes at a time, the sail would seem to get lighter as I learned to let the water slowly fall off it before hauling it up and the board became more and more stable as I understood where to put my feet and how to keep enough wind in the sail to keep from falling over. I learned some technique, like tacking (turning around while stepping around the front of the mast) and planing (gaining enough speed that the board lifts up and skims across the surface of the water).

Twenty-plus years into this sport I still experience the same thrill and catch glimpses of what the next level of skill will be like. It’s a pretty solitary activity (although there’s great camaraderie among windsurfers onshore) and there’s something about harnessing the wind directly with your own body that is incredibly meditative, therapeutic and stimulating at the same time. I’m very happy that my nephew, Erik, has taken an interest in windsurfing and I’ve seen his excitement when he gets going for a few seconds.

I am sailing my trusty old board (the whole rig is in surprisingly good condition after all these years; most of the decals are still intact and I’ve managed to not tear the sail). The wind is just starting to pick up after being fickle for most of the afternoon. It’s been mostly cloudy so far this summer so the lake hasn’t had much of a chance to warm up: added incentive not to fall in. But I’m focused on the wind. I’m on a broad reach, getting a feel for the conditions. There’s a lull but I’ve come to realize over the years that there’s always a pocket about this far from shore. Sure enough I see the telltale ripples just ahead and I sheet out a bit to anticipate the sudden pull. I ease the sail back in a bit and in no time I’m planing. I hook into the harness line on the boom. This is still a new thing for me even though I’ve been using a harness for a few years. Especially the first few times I go out in a season I’m acutely aware of the probability that I’ll be catapulted by an unforeseen gust. But this time I feel fairly secure. I sheet in some more, lean back, and commit most of my weight to the harness. I step back on the board and the wind picks up some more. I’m constantly making minute corrections in the angle of the sail as the wind and the waves change the weight balance. Aside from a single fishing boat in the distance I have the entire lake to myself. I hear the waves slap against the bottom of the board and the wind hiss through my ears and feel myself hurtle across the surface of the infinite blackness of the water reflecting the shifting clouds above and I have no thoughts racing through my brain — just the intent focus on maintaining this balance. It is glorious and blissful and thrilling and familiar and surprising. My breaths seem to take in twice as much oxygen as normal. I look back at the shrinking buildings I left behind a few minutes ago and the rounded mountain behind them set against brilliant, clear blue. For a moment, all that exists is this moment.

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This weekend Nathan and I hiked to Lake Aloha, in the Sierras, and camped overnight. We took the Pacific Crest Trail from Lower Echo Lake, about a six mile trek and 1000 ft. of elevation gain. Doesn’t sound like much, but with the weight of our packs it was quite challenging. However, the views were breathtaking as I hope will come through a bit in these photos. (more…)