So people constantly send me links to music and email me tracks that I am going to absolutely ‘lurrve’ (yes, spelt that way) and despite the fact that I am flattered that they took the effort for the most part my general reaction is Meh!

Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I just don’t get the music that those crazy kids are listening to these days but yesterday that changed. I was IM’ed a track that saved my frakkin’ lame-ass weekend and has been on single repeat on the iPod and the MacBook for most of last night and all of today. The big THX rated sub-woofer that sits at my feet has never been happier (Note to self: Stop anthropomorphising objects. They hate it!)

Despite its distinctly French sound it is actually by a German duo called Sirirusmo and Dana and it is called Gummiband, which means rubberband in some language according to the Google.

The first comment on the Youtube page on which I heard this song went something like ‘If this song went on for 12 hours I would never have a bad day ever again.’

I totally agree. If this track doesn’t make you want to get up and shake your ass then you are dead inside.

Be good, avoid assholes.

Steal the MP3 from the internets here.

Music Dana, Gummiband, iPod, MacBook Pro, Siriusmo, Siriusmo-Gummiband, THX

Wallpaper.com has an excellent gallery of tart cards up on its site. It is enough to warm the heart of any type fan or closet perv.

What exactly is a tart card? Lemme quote from the site.

“Tart cards are the means by which many London prostitutes advertise their services. Step into almost any central London phone box and you can contemplate up to 80 cards inviting you to be tied, teased, spanked or massaged.”

Click the picture to go see the entire gallery.

I also got dragged, kicking, screaming and cussing to go see the new Tom Hanks starrer, ‘Angels & Demons’.  After unanimously declaring that Dan Brown’s previous rag, The Da Vinci Code was the worst book I had ever read (And I’ve read some utter garbage) I swore to avoid this film like the swine flu. I succesfully dodged a gracious offer from a friend for free passes and was headed for the finish line when the mother pulled rank and said “We’re going” a couple of nights back. It gives me small consolation to know she hated it as much as I did. Serves her right for having such poor taste in films. Read more…

Films, Random, Tech Angels & Demons, Angels And Demons, Anti Matter Bomb, apple, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Snow Leopard Pricing, Star Trek, The DaVince Code, Tom Hanks, twitter, twitter.com/samrethsingh, twitter.com/themediabitch, Wallpaper.com, WWDC

The Hobo Dock, originally uploaded by SA-7™.

So, a couple of weeks ‘mi familia’ was nice enough to get me an iPod Touch 2G for the birthday. Woot!

Since I’m too cheap to spring for a dock I used my old Western Digital MyBook external hard disk and incorporated the dock insert that came with the Touch into it’s side. It took a heated cutter, some kind of liquid cement and a whole lot of patience. The edges are fugly right now because of the extra cement on them but I’ll clean that up. What would make this mod really cool would be to incoroprate a tiny USB hub into the MyBook so I’d have only one USB cable to the MacBook Pro. Click the image for notes on what’s in the picture. The Macbook Pro is at a wierd angle because it’s sitting on a laptop stand I made out of recycled cardboard after reading an article at Unplggd.com. If you use a laptop on a regular basis do your back and neck a favour and make one for yourself. Out of the frame on the left is a keyboard, mouse and a 22″ LG LCD monitor with extremely crap viewing angles.

Sorry for the shiite quality of the picture. Serves me right for using a camera phone.

Random, Tech apple, iPod Touch 2g, LEGO, LG LCD monitor, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, My Book, Speck case, Tiger Beer, Unplugged.com, Western Digital

Regular visitors (stop sniggering, they exist) may have noticed that I changed this weblog’s (or blog’s, for the cool kidz) name from my own to something a bit more fitting. It is now called Media Bitch or Media B*tch.

I have also done some minor tweaking and removed the ‘Sporadic Creativity’ page because I’m putting myself out there as it is and don’t want to overdo it. So. I’m going to talk about two geeky things today.

1> I got my first real chance to play around with my ‘trial copy’ of Adobe’s brilliant new Photoshop version for the Mac platform. CS4.

I’ve always thought of Photoshop as a huge resource hog of an app that takes ages to launch and for small jobs is a bit like unholstering a Colt to kill a fly but I must say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with this new version. It’s screaming fast, light and for the first time ever it’s features are easy to get to and use even if you aren’t some Photoshop Uber-Geek with mad skillz. The speed difference must be because this is the first version of Photoshop that is actually GPU accelerated. On a mid level system like mine (2.4 Ghz Merom Core2duo, 3 Gb DDR2 and a 256MB Nvidia 8600M GT) that seems to make an immense difference. The usability is much better too, for me at least. So I spent a few hours and threw together the logo at the top of this page and ventured the courage to edit the CSS style sheets for this site to get WordPress to display the art work. Read more…

Rants, Tech Adobe Photoshop CS4 Mac, app, MacBook Pro, Media B*tch, Media Bitch, Mighty Mouse Wireless, piratebay

This is Microsoft’s official infomercial for SongBirdSmith, their <cringing> GarageBand Killer. While you watch it please remember that Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies in the world and this is the best it can come up with.

For those not in the know GarageBand is Apple’s entry level music production software that comes preloaded on every Mac. It makes it very simple for anyone but the most tone-deaf moron to quickly throw together a jingle or soundtrack like this one here. Try sitting through the entire film. I couldn’t.

P.S. Those shiny silver laptops in the Microsoft ad? ALL Apple MacBook Pros. MICROSOFT FAIL!

P.P.S. Thanks to Aditya for the tip. Its SongSmith not SongBird. In my defence MS’s naming isn’t the most intuitive in the world. Look at Windows’ names: 98,ME,2000,XP,Vista,7 i.e. A year,two letters, a year, a word and a random number. Geez.

Tech apple, GarageBand, MacBook Pro, Microsoft, SongSmith

Since I am feeling rather geeky today I thought I’d write about a new utility I discovered recently for my notebook and how that got me thinking about the Mac platform. If you aren’t into tech you should probably just skip this entire post. Go look at cute cats here.

One of the greatest things about a Macintosh notebook is that you never, ever need to shut it down, ever. One things Macs do really well is what the PC world calls a suspend state or in Mac lingo is Sleep. This is particularly important on notebooks because once you are done with your work, say in a library, in class, at work or wherever, you drop the lid on your MacBook and get up and go. Once you’ve got where you want to be you pull out your MacBook, open the lid and you are right back where you left off. Immediately. No boot up, no login, no restarting applications or opening documents, everything is the way it was when you last closed the lid.

You pull out your MacBook and start doing what you have to with it while people with Windows notebooks sit and look at boot-up screens resignedly and if they are running Vista you’re normally done googling, mailing or writing half a page before they hear their Windows startup sound. 

Its also fun to just close the lid and drop the MacBook into your bag and have people say “Don’t you need to shut it down?” and answer “Meh.. It’s a Mac.”

 
From here on things get geeky.

Read more…

Tech apple, apple killing firewire, developers, firewire, Intel, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Nvidia, Power PC, Safe Sleep, Smart Sleep, Steve Jobs