I’ve “borrowed” a few LP’s from my father in law and this is the first one I’ve played. I know this is one of Bowie’s concept albums from his Ziggy Stardust phase. I don’t know that much about Bowie apart from his greatest hits album, which I love. I have never listened to any of his albums in full, until now.

The front of the sleeve is one of those images that is ever familiar, Bowie holding a guitar under the “K. WEST” sign in London somewhere. I wonder where that sign is now… and did this image inspire Kanye? The back is of Bowie stood in a London phone box wearing some kind of cat suit. Bowie is effortlessly cool on both sides of the sleeve. I love the “TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME” written underneath the credits.

Now to the music, I’ve definitely heard “Starman” and “Ziggy Stardust” before, but want to hear the album as it was meant to be heard, from Side 1, track 1 all the way to the end.

To me, a concept album is something that is experimental, or far from what the artist would normally play. But I’m listening to this in 2012, forty years after the record was released, so concept is difficult to comprehend, to me it’s Bowie. And because it’s become familiar, due to it having inspired so many artists over the last four decades, it has lost what must have been the “edge” it had in the first instance.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic, and MUST be listened to in its entirety, “Ziggy Stardust” is incredible, my favourite track, closely followed by “Moonage Daydream.” What people thought of this album when it was first released I can’t even try to understand. But today, forty years after its initial release, it sounds great. I’m going to listen to it again.

So I bought my first ever record the other day. Yes, vinyl. I inherited a huge amount of records recently and thought it would be a shame for such a fantastic record collection to gather dust, so I found myself a turntable, a Technics 1210 Mk 2 and a phono stage.

I haven’t yet received said collection but have been itching to play a record so picked up this James Blake number the other day. I like James Blake, he’s alright, but I’d never heard/heard of any of the songs on this EP before I got it on the turntable. Well apart from “Case of you” which he covers, originally sung by the amazing Joni Mitchell.

I like the sleeve, although it seems to imply this is a livelier group of songs than it actually is. The whole feel of this extended play is a little more subdued than Blake’s usual stuff (if thats even possible) but is warm and has been growing on me with every play. The stand-out track is the title track followed by the Mitchell cover.

The third track on Side A features Bon Iver, who I’m a fan of, but the song sounds so like you’d imagine a collaboration between them would sound it makes me wonder whether it’s a little joke on us (and why the barking dog?).

Overall a cool little first vinyl purchase, I can see me buying many more in future.

One of my favourite songs over the last few years has been covered on Drake’s new album “Take Care” released 14th November (Universal).

Gil Scot-Heron’s “I’ll Take Care of You” originally appeared on the album “I’m New Here” released in 2010. This track in itself is a cover of a record by Bobby Bland released in 1959.

The version of the track I love so much is on the Jamie XX remix of Scot-Herons album titled “We’re New Here” released in February 2011, the same year Gil Scot-Heron sadly passed away.

For me the incredible thing about this track the simple beat, the hype piano and laid back lyrics, have a listen.

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The Drake cover of the song has him re-united with Rihanna. It has the same melody of the Jamie XX remix but with Rihanna’s sultry tones and Drake opting to sing his lines which adds to the chilled out feel of this track. There’s no way this won’t be out as a single of its own, I’m looking forward to the release. Listen below

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The whole album is getting dope reviews, I’ve only just got my copy and it’s playing now. I might post a review in a few days.

Remember to bring your wellies, ‘cos it will be knee deep in clunge!!

I can’t wait!!!

It’s in cinema’s August 18th.

Another day, another gig. I was lucky enough to win tickets to see the Arctic Monkeys live at the iTunes festival http://www.itunesfestival.com/ last night.

This wasn’t the first iTunes gig I’ve been to, I’ve won tickets for at least one gig for the last three years, every single one has been awesome. My favorite was Placebo in July 09.

It’s down to the venue, the Roundhouse in Camden is excellent, capacity is around three thousand, the acoustics are excellent and there’s never a massive queue for the bar. How often do you get to see bands like Kasabian and the Foo Fighters in a small venue?!?!

For those that are interested, see the setlist below. The outstanding track was 505. Amazing.

Library Pictures
Brianstorm
This House Is A Circus
Still Take You Home
Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair
Pretty Visitors
(with John Ashton)
She’s Thunderstorms
Teddy Picker
Crying Lightning
Brick by Brick
The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala
The View From The Afternoon
I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor
All My Own Stunts
If You Were There, Beware
Do Me A Favour
When The Sun Goes Down
Encore:
Suck It and See
Fluorescent Adolescent
505

I was lucky enough to go to the Kings of Leon at Hyde Park, London on 22nd June. They were supported by the White Lies and Paul Weller who were both also really good. KOL opened with “Four Kicks” and must have been on for an hour and a half. They were absolutely mind-blowing. See below one of my favourite songs of theirs:

About halfway though Caleb asked the audience to toast “a friend of ours who passed away… this is for you Ryan” and went into “McFearless” as a tribute to Ryan Dunn, their friend who died a couple of days previously.

Here’s their setlist for the day:

Four Kicks
Taper Jean Girl
Pistol of Fire
My Party
The Immortals
Molly’s Chambers
Crawl
Charmer
On Call
Arizona
Fans
Back Down South
Notion
The Bucket
McFearless
Mary
No Money
Closer
California Waiting
Pyro
Knocked Up
Sex on Fire

And the Encore:
Radioactive
Use Somebody
Black Thumbnail

Here is the first post of this series.

The 1.66 mini came with an 80 GB hard drive and 512mb of ram. The first thing I did was look into how to upgrade those two. The extra ram would help with the ripping, converting and viewing of my movies, the extra hard disk space for the storing of movies. Each DVD disc takes up around 8 gig unconverted so by my basic maths that’s only 10 dvd’s on this baby!! I’ve got around 400 dvd’s, that’s not going to work!

A quick google led me to http://www.ifixit.com/. This site shows you how, in very simple steps to upgrade the above. The mini takes a specific sized hard disk – 2.5 inches which is smaller than your average disk. The clue is in the name I suppose. At the time the largest capacity disk I could find was 500Gb and I paid around £70 on amazon. I believe you can get 750 gb disks now and that size is only going to get bigger as technology moves forward.

I then went to www.crucial.com for the ram. This site has a very nifty tool to help you find the right ram for the system you are buying it for, if I recall correctly was around £70 for 2GB, the most this computer can take. I had a rummage in my man-drawer for a putty knife and a small Phillips screwdriver and I was set.

The upgrade was a very simple process, all in all it took about forty minutes which is around four hours less than I thought it would take me.

I booted up the mini, installed OS X from scratch and crossed my fingers. The system recognised both of my upgrades. Result! I now had a nearly fully functional HTPC.

The only other bits of hardware I bought were a DVI-HDMI adapter to enable the mini to feed an hdmi signal to the television, a toslink to 3.5mm cable for the digital audio and a lovely white apple remote. Now I’m ready for the software.

To be continued.

I managed to get hold of an iPad 2 over the weekend. I didn’t know what I would use it for, it’s just one of those gadgets you want. I’ve been using it now for two full days and am absolutely blown away.

After the first couple of hours of use I was thinking about taking it back, I could see it was good but didn’t think it was £400 worth of good. I was surfing the internet, checking emails, tweeting, facebooking and downloading apps. Although nice, it wasn’t going to replace my laptop. Then I had a few WOW moments.

Flipboard (http://flipboard.com/) was the first. It presents your Facebook, Twitter and a number of other websites/feeds in a magazine format. It just looks amazing and makes reading that info such a pleasure I don’t want to go to the Twitter website or look at Facebook on the iPhone anymore.

The Times app (http://www.timesplus.co.uk/welcome/ipad) was the next. This is how a newspaper should be presented on a tablet. It’s such an enjoyable way to read a paper. I don’t normally read the Times but I’m going to via this app. The navigation is incredible and it’s presented so well. I’m currently on a 30 day free trial but once over I’m definitely subscribing.

Remote (http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/) by Apple. I have an enormous iTunes library stored on a mac mini that is plugged into speakers at home and have been using this app on my iPhone for some time now. The iPad version blows it out of the water. It just looks and feels incredible.

Plex (http://www.plexapp.com/ios.php). I have had Plex installed on my mac mini (I’ll talk about it later in another post) for a while and have had the iOS app on my iPhone. Now I’ve installed this on the iPad I can watch every movie and tv show stored at home wherever I am in the world on a big screen with all the meta info and images and ratings Plex scrapes from it’s various sources. Amazing!!!

Splashtop (http://www.splashtop.com/remote) again mac mini related. I have to do a fair bit of screen-sharing to administer the mac mini. I’m usually on the laptop for this but this app for the iPad means I can do it all on the tablet. And it’s a much more fun to boot.

All my word processing and spreadsheet needs are covered with documents to go. File organisation is covered by dropbox. This device is incredible. I believe the only time I’m going to be using the laptop now is for Photoshop and Illustrator work. I’m just looking for an app that I can stream my iTunes library to my iPad with. Oh and a decent folio style case. Then the package will be complete.

Frank Ocean is going to be the next big thing. Fact. He’s been featuring on tracks by members of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All for a little while now and has just released his debut album entitled Nostalgia, Ultra. At first you think he’s just another R&B artist with his smooth vocals and laid back beats but have a proper listen – the writing is clever, the voice is good and it sounds better than your average Chris Brown and Bruno Mars pop bullshit. Here’s one of my favourites, Swim Good.

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A little while ago I was kindly given an Apple Mac Mini on an “if you can fix it you can keep it” basis. It turned out it had been given to a friend by somebody who was emigrating and he had forgotten the password of the admin account… The things people throw away!!!

A couple of minutes spent talking to uncle google soon had the password cracked, I still can’t believe how easy that was.
If you keep any sensitive data on your computer I urge you to look into possible encryption or something more secure.

Also have a look at Prey http://preyproject.com/ – you register your computer on their website and if it get’s into the wrong hands you can immobilise the machine the moment it connects to the internet.

I wondered what to do with the mini now I had it working. I had two laptops at the time, an old 15’ powerbook G4 on its way out and a recent MacBook Pro 15’ so didn’t need the computer for day to day use. It’s a proper core duo apple computer but I didn’t really have anywhere to put a computer with a monitor and a keyboard. Again after consultation with uncle google I decided to use it as a home theatre pc (HTPC) to free up the space 400 or so DVD’s take up in my tiny Victorian cottage.

It’s a 1.66 core duo so I knew it could playback HD content, I knew I could get a tv receiver for it, I knew about Apple’s front row interface, I knew about apple’s very simple remote control. I had to tread carefully though. I wanted to use it as an important part of our movie watching and if using it was any harder than simple, the wife wouldn’t use it which would defeat the purpose.

Continued here.