Author Archive for Rik

Still alive, just busy…

Published by Rik on January 25, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Good lord! It seems that I haven’t blogged since last November, how remiss of me. Well, I’m still alive, just been a busy little bee…

I designed/built a new website for digger/excavator bucket attachments - www.digascreener.com. Based on WordPress (as per usual) it is truly the most social-software aware, 2.0-powered digger bucket attachment website out there. Watch the videos, they are awesome.

I’ve also spent much of the last month working at the V&A Museum, attempting to de-crappify the frontend of an online ticketing system they bought in, which was challenging (due to the amazing ineptness of the default front-end code) but also lots of fun and very rewarding. Expect it to go live some time….soonish?

Most recently I’ve been working with Phil Wilkinson and cohort on an (iterative, iterative, iterative…) redesign of www.crowdstorm.com (product review/informaton aggregation and social recommendation oh my!  - NOT price comparison, we hasten to add)  which is also challenging but lots of fun (occassional migraines notwithstanding).

Oh, and finally I’ve sort-of launched a new music blog/podcast at www.minimalschminimal.com which has some nice DJ mixes and stuff on it, plus a video of a techno viking. I hope to be able to actually add some fresh content to it in the near future…

So, that’s what I’ve been up to…how YOU doing?

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My cat loves to code…

Published by Rik on November 2, 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

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Flock | the social web browser

Published by Rik on November 2, 2007 in Social Software and web2.0. 0 Comments

Flock | the social web browser

I just installed version 1.0 of Flock, a ’social web browser’ based upon Firefox, and my initial impressions are that I am totally impressed and blown away. Aside from the fact that it is apparently much more stable than Firefox (which I’ve kept using as I am so dependent on Firebug) the integration of your various social tools/sites (Facebook, flickr, YouTube, twitter and more…) is seamless and beautiful. For example, I’m writing this blog post inside Flock. Once you have logged in to your blogging account you can just right-click on any web page and select ‘Blog This’ and away you go! But it gets better…

Assuming you are a facebook addict, just log in to facebook and all your friends will appear in the Flock ‘People’ sidebar. You can then keep track of updates, message, poke, change your status etc without leaving your browser, which is nice. The same applies for twitter.

But it gets even yet still more betterer…

If you log-in to your flickr account (or piczo or photobucket), you can then see a ‘media toolbar’ along the top of your browser window with all your flickr photos, which is nice. Say you want to share a photo with a facebook or twitter friend - simply drag and drop the photo onto their name in the sidebar and voila, flock automagically creates a message directing them to said photo. How cool is that? Alternatively you can click the arrow icon on a photo in the media bar and choose to blog it, email it, or get a link to the image or a bb url…haha! All this also applies for your YouTube videos as well - just toggle between which ‘media stream’ you want to see in the media bar. But it isn’t just your accounts you can view in the media bar, you can also subscribe to media feeds for your friends or indeed for any user of any of these services.

But wait, there is more! Flock also has a built in RSS reader. And a built in photo uploader which can upload to flickr, or piczo, or facebook…

AND, it plays nicely with FireBug, so I am a very happy camper.

Flock does genuinely seem to deliver almost seamless integration of your various social software services within the browser - I haven’t been as excited by a piece of web technology for, ooh, several weeks. It remains to be seen how stable it really is, and what other services they will support (I’m thinking last.fm) but my initial impressions having played with it for the last hour, while configuring it and writing this post, is that is, in a nutshell, extremely impressive.

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Rik’s Podcast #4 - Louis Atkins techno mix

Published by Rik on October 19, 2007 in Music, Podcast, Techno and mp3. 4 Comments

Good lordy it is another podcast in my series. Mikey Lambe will be amazed at my industry, I would imagine. ANYWAY, this mix brings you the mad skills of my very good friend Louis “as in ‘Juan’, but not actually related” Atkins, resident of Bethnal Green, native of Copacabana, Rio, ‘Brasil’ (sic, and who am I to argue…) - all round good chap and ace techno/electro producer and DJ. Funnily enough, and quite meta, I am blogging this podcast from Louis’ room, on Louis’ computer, which has a ‘Brasilian’ keyboard, so if my punctuation goes a bit pear-shaped, that’s why. Louis is LITERALLY doing a mix for, me, live, while I blog about his mix which is the feature of this podcast. See: It went meta… did you see where it did that? (Option-W to do a question mark. How completely intuitive. ANYWAY…) ANYWAY. Here is the set list for the mix you are about to download and then listen to, somewhat slack-jawed at it’s amazingness.

TRACKLIST!

  1. Michael Mayer - Love Food (Kompakt)
  2. M.A.N.D.Y vs. Booka Shade feat. Laurie Anderson - Oh Superman (Get Physical)
  3. Rekorder - 9.1 (Rekorder)
  4. Teflon - The Wombat (Rebelone)
  5. Lutzenkirchen - Kobalt (Craftmusic)
  6. Jurgen Paape + Boy Schaufler/Gesang - We Love (Kompakt)
  7. Trentemoller - Moan *Radio Slave remix for k/instrumental (Poker Flat)
  8. Audion - Fire (Cocoon)
    …it starts to get quite fucked up around here…
  9. Supermayer - Two Of Us (Kompakt)
    …pass the bong, dude…
  10. Simon Baker - Plastik (Playhouse)
  11. Tiefschwarz - Original *Carl Craig remix (Souvenir)
  12. Adam Beyer - AWC Pt.1 (Plus8 )
  13. Danilo Vigorito - Temperance (Intelligence)
  14. Kabale und Liebe & Daniel Sanchez - Mumbling Yeah (Area Remote)
  15. Kaliber - 13.1 (Kaliber)
  16. Cobblestone Jazz - W (Cocoon/K7/Wagon Repair - go nuts)
  17. Craig Torrance & Philip Hochstrate - Shrinkage *Samim remix (4twenty)
  18. Gui Boratto - Beautiful Life (Kompakt)

There, isn’t that awesome-sounding? (Option-W, remember…) If you enjoyed this mix why not subscribe to my podcast in ‘like iTunes and shit’ by simply clicking the iTunes feed at top of my left column, right here? Then you will LITERALLY receive a hot injection of ”fresh’ new ‘beats’ approximately every week, delivered straight to your iTunes, without you having to lift so much as a finger, literally. Isn’t technology awesome?

So, enjoy Louis’ mix, he is a wicked DJ.

Coming up next, a mix by the mysterious entity known only as ‘Genki‘…

 
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I AM EH

Published by Rik on October 18, 2007 in Art and Transport. 1 Comment

When we were in Vancouver over the summer we saw this amazing VW Beetle “art car” parked just off Robson St…

art_car_02.jpg

Not only was it totally encrusted with what must have been 20 years accretion of trinkets, baubles, geegaws, dolls, deities, slogans, flags, tchotchkes, canadiana, ephemera and assorted miscellaneous crap…

art_car_01.jpg

…It also featured a fairy grotto in the back seat area complete with working water fountain and tinkling ambient music. Awesome….pass the bong, dude.

art_car_03.jpg

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Redecorating…and the joys of Wordpress

Published by Rik on October 18, 2007 in Blogs, Design and wordpress. 0 Comments

I have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 which was made literally as simple as clicking a button by my fine hosts, dreamhost. Most everything seems to have gone smoothly, but you may notice that a few bits and bobs have disappeared from the sidebar for the time being. These will return soon, in addition to a cornucopia of new goodies - in fact I’ve gone for a three-column layout so I can fit loads more crap functionality onto the blog.

Adding lots of pointless blog bling (’blong’? - maybe not…) is made trivially easy as I am using the most excellent K2 theme which, along with being super-easy to customize (thanks to the ’styles’ features which allows you to create  a new stylesheet which overrides the k2 defaults without touching the core files) and ‘pimp out’ (thanks to the kick-ass k2-sidebar manager which lets you drag-and-drop modules into the sidebars, set which pages they appear on, and more - including running PHP scripts inside the page)  also features some rather nifty , jquery-powered AJAX-y functionality - check out the advanced search or click the ‘«older’ link at top of page for two examples.

Continue reading ‘Redecorating…and the joys of Wordpress’

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Rik’s Podcast #3 - ‘I Am A Machine’ - DJ Omar

Published by Rik on October 11, 2007 in Music, Podcast, Techno and mp3. 1 Comment

Rounding off the inaugural tasty triumvirate of tuneful techno treats from Norway we have the third awesome mix by DJ Omar (Ole Martin Vilberg). This one is called “I Am A Machine” (tracklist below).

This weekend Ole Martin is playing a few DJ sets at the Insomnia Festival in Tromsø, Norway, which looks totally amazing - wish I could be there! Hm…I wonder if EasyJet flies to Norway…

Track List!

  1. Jason Emsley – P.H.I.A.P.O.S.
  2. Reggy Van Oers – Metza
  3. Misc. – Staroulette
  4. Shane Berry – Fillertet (Gabriel Ananda rmx)
  5. Raudive – Non
  6. Error Error – End Of The Day
  7. Schaeben & Voss feat. Schad Privat – Blaze
  8. Ame – Balandine
  9. Steve Rachmad – I Am A Machine
  10. Redshape – 2084
  11. Kevin Saunderson – Till We Meet Again (Carl Craig rmx)
  12. Agoria – Les Plastiques Ivres

If you have enjoyed any or all of these mixes why not add Ole Martin to you facebook friends, and, like, give him a gnome for his virtual garden, or something…

Skrææææææ æ æ æ æææ ævsylte!

 
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Rik’s Podcast #2 - “In The Moog For Love” by DJ Omar

Published by Rik on October 10, 2007 in Music, Podcast, Techno and mp3. 0 Comments

OK, hot on the heels of my inaugural podcast, as promised here is the second installment of the DJ Omar triple-whammy of techno-acid-electro goodness. This one is called “In The Moog For Love”.

[by the way, this DJ Omar is not to be confused with the ' Top Czech paty DJ' (sic) of the same name on last.fm, who is probably a bit shit.]

Track List:

  1. Soul Capsule – Waiting 4 Away
  2. Pan/Tone – Whodunit
  3. Cybotron – Clear (Troy Pierce rmx)
  4. Guy Gerber – Planetarium – Cocoon
  5. Steadycam – In The Moog For Love
  6. Simon Baker – Plastik
  7. Kalabrese – Not The Same Shoes
  8. Guy Gerber – Are U Naked
  9. Paul Kalkbrenner – Ick Muss….
  10. I:Cube – Chicago Sur Seine
  11. Canavas – The Cat
  12. Sascha Dive – Down Edit (Argy rmx)
 
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Rik’s Podcast #1 - “I Lick Your Spine” by DJ Omar

Published by Rik on October 9, 2007 in Music, Podcast, Techno and mp3. 1 Comment

OK, here we go. Although I love techno music I have never tried my hand at creating my own mixes, and realistically, I probably never will. Luckily, I have lots of talented DJ type friends who can do that kind of thing for me. So this is the first in a fairly regular series of podcasts where I will be piggybacking on the talent of these friends in order to bask in their reflected glory, and hopefully expose them to a wider audience. Because they really are very good, all of them. As I’m sure you will agree once you check out their mixes.

First up is DJ Omar - aka Ole Martin Vilberg from Oslo, Norway, who has recently done not one, nor even two, but THREE marvellous, acid tinged hour long excursions to a happy techno place. I met Ole Martin and his equally lovely partner Tonje in the T Bar in London’s fashionable/skanky Shoreditch - we hit it off and spent a fantastic night dancing exuberantly, shrieking “SKRAEVSYLTE” (google it…) at the top of our lungs and generally being quite silly.

Anyway, turns out he an ace DJ. And to prove it, I’m going to start this whole podcast series with his three recent mixes. I spoil you, I really do. First up is ‘The Sirup Mix‘ ‘I Lick Your Spine’.

[Update - Ole Martin mislabelled the mixes but now we got it straight, and we also have track listings! If you want to rename your MP3s - assuming you downloaded them, The Sirup Mix is actually I Lick Your Spine, and what WAS I Lick Your Spine is Actually 'In The Moog For Love'. Glad we cleared that up...]

Tracklisting:

  1. Luciano – Fourges Et Sabres
  2. Let’s Go Outside – I’ll Lick Your Spine (Repeat Repeat rmx)
  3. Ben Westbeech – Hang Around (Karizma rmx)
  4. Rework – Love Love Love Yeah (Chloè rmx)
  5. Wouldbenice – One Cell
  6. Jurgen Paape – Nord
  7. Larsson - Off Voices
  8. Shonky – Olympia
  9. Dusty Kid – Kore
  10. Shane Berry – Fillertet 2 (Gabriel Ananda rmx)

 
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Flickr Photo Album plugin

Published by Rik on September 11, 2007 in Photos and wordpress. 0 Comments

I’ve been looking for a way to incorporate my flickr photos into my blog posts and by jingo the Flickr Photo Album  plugin seems to be just the ticket! Here is a picture of Tashi the labradoodle:

Tashi the labradoodle

Once installed, not only do you get all your photos displayed in the Write post window, you can also search everyone’s photos by tag, add photos into sidebar, display photosets as albums in your blog, and customize display options such as using lightbox. Neat.

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