I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned it until now, but I’m officially in a band called The You Dig It Einsteins. We have about 10 almost-songs at this point, and are working toward our first EP. Stay tuned for more details about that.
Here’s a video I think is awesome. This guy Billy plays a tonne of intruments (including two saxaphones at the same time?) for a band called Man Man. I don’t know what this weird breath-powered keyboard is, but I like it.
Am I the only one getting addicted to web 2.0 stuff?
My newest fixation is thesixtyone.com – it’s basically a music-based mash up of Digg.com / The Stock Market for songs.
For example if I add (aka digg) a track by Arcade Fire I can then ‘bump’ it (aka opposite of digg- bury). If enough people do that, the song might get front-page status, and I get more points and maybe level up. It’s fun and addictive – what’s more you can search new music by genre, which is a good way to hear some new tunes.
If you’re interested in trying it do me a fav and sign up by this link to score me some points http://www.thesixtyone.com/? referred_by_username=arleym
Heh.
Recently my brother found himself at a summer camp sharing a limited satillite internet connection with several other internet users armed with laptops. When the hourly allotment of bandwidth was exceeded the connection speed suffered huge. We started to think up ways to be byte-conscious.
When I started brainstorming ideas to save bandwidth I thought I would have like two or three points, but I guess I’m a lot nerdier than even I could have known.
1) Set auto Disconnects Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections > the settings for that conenction > advanced > Check “Disconnect if Idle for more than” maybe 5 min or so.
2) Turn off superflous media – Think about it, if someone’s home page is msn.com (which I think is default on IE installs), then they have to download all those images for every inane article about Tom Cruise and weight loss… Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > turn off animations, images and sounds… this sounds harsh, but you will see where image boxes are and I think you can right click > Show image. I would show your users how to do this, sometimes they may want the images on auto (or maybe there’s some way to toggle it per page, I dunno I’ve never used it). Multimedia is the biggest source of bandwidth on most pages. I hope that animation bit includes flash…
3) Avoid Unnecessary or Large downloads - No bittorrents / downloading of media / online gaming, discourage file sharing on IM
4) Avoid Streams - discourage media streaming, skype, youtube, imeem and other audio or webcam transmissions. If users have to upload some video / audio it might be a good idea to set up a schedule. Ie. AJ can be a media uploader from 6 – 7, Johnny from 7 – 8, etc. This is another huge source of bandwidth.
5) Send Smart Emails - there are other ways to make emailing more efficient. Maybe instead of emailing people one at a time to tell them the same stuff, group email (it means less responses though). As an email alternative set up twitter accounts and blogs and tell all your people they can track you from these. These can even be updated by SMS on your cell phones.
5.5) Receive Smart Emails - Tell people to stop sending attachments and forwards. Also, if you get them, don’t open them. If you don’t bring the email to browser that bandwidth isn’t eaten. Maybe create a new folder to check when there is more bandwidth. The video of the cat jumping into the wall will be just as funny and applicable when the internet rationing summer is over.
6) Clean Home page - set home pages to Google.ca – this is about the cleanest smallest page ever. Compare that to something like yahoo and you download a lot less stuff for the browser to read. Your home page is your most visited, it should be light (in your browser Tools > Internet options)
7) Almalgomate your web 2.0 pages - are you checking all of your online accounts ie. Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, twitter etc? Setting up something like Netvibes might help you combine these all in one place like this http://www.netvibes.com/axiomaudio
8) Better yet, start an RSS Reader - Most modern sites now have RSS feeds. You can follow your facebook news feed, digg news, weather, and blogs with RSS. For example, AJ has a blog at http://albertaaj.blogspot.com/- rather than view that and load all the images and page elements you can visit his RSS http://albertaaj.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default – but rather than read it here you can subscribe to it in an RSS reader. Do you have a Gmail account? If so then you already have Google Reader at your service (linked at the top left) Click the Add Subscrition and paste that feed into the feild. Presto. With RSS readers like this (and there are more, I think in-browser and Outlook are two other common examples) you can read your web content all in one place – and without unnecessary page elements taking up bandwidth.
9) Turn off System internet use where possible - Check out what processes are running in your taskbar and task manager (ctrl + alt + delete > processes). Turn off ones that search the internet for updates, turn off Windows auto update, close any widgets or sidebar items that are also getting web information. This also includes closing programs like email clients that automatically access the internet periodically. Just check it when you need it. If you’re not getting email attachments or downloads this means you can also update spyware and antivirus less often as you’re less vulnerable. (but I take no responsibility if your system bites it!)
10) Make sure you’re caching – make sure your system isn’t redownloading content every time you visit pages. Control Panel > Internet Options > Browsing History > settings > I would set it to automatically, but if you’re being a hero you could say never. I think you should increase your disk space for cache to the maximum recommended (250MB for me) and beef up your history say to 50 days.
These ten tips make good general sense, but sometimes you need to be able to go online and enjoy the things you miss most from home. I think this is where planning a schedule will help. Maybe each of you has a night of the week to do some of the bandwidth-heavy things that aren’t the best on shared and limited resources!
Have any ideas of your own? I’d love to hear more on this topic!
For maybe the last five years I have joked with friends about making a Coffin Table: a coffee table that will one day be my coffin. It would be a great conversation piece, and a nice bit of storage space. Brilliant right? So far this idea has only met opposition in my friends. So that must mean it’s a bad idea right? WRONG. It means my friends are poor judges of great ideas. On May 12 I dugg up this page Coffin Table. I coulda been someone.
Also this weekend we saw the brightest and biggest rainbow I have ever seen. I could see the whole arc from horizon to horizon. What’s more, it had another half rainbow outlining. It was awesome. Here’s the music video of the week: Menomena’s Wet and Rusting.
Has there ever been a song or band that you heard that you didn’t like until you saw the video? I can think of more than a few. It’s like after adding some moving pictures you finally see the angle the artists are coming from. Sometimes the video will make or break the band.
I know you have some favourite music videos. Comment me up to share your picks. With all the online video services like Vimeo, YouTube and Pitchfork.tv we should spend more time checking out and sharing great videos. Maybe that’s a great mix idea?
Here are some favourite videos of mine…
The White Stripes – Hardest Button to Button
Bjork – Human Behaviour
Menomena – Cough Coughing
Beck – Deadweight
Man Man – Black Mission Goggles
Architecture in Helsinki
Radiohead – Knives Out
The Coral – Dreaming of You
The Black Keys – 10am Automatic
Feist – Mushaboom
The Hives – Walk idiot walk
Uncle – Rabbit in your headlights (featuring Thom Yorke)
The Bees – Listening Man
Of Montreal – The Past is a Grotesque Animal (acoustic)
Tom Waits – I don’t wanna grow up (Ramones cover)
Stereogram – Walkie Talkie Man
This past weekend I had a chance to see Gordon Lightfoot at Massey Hall in Toronto. No one would ever call me a huge Gordon Lightfoot fan, it was something my parents used to listen to. When you’re a kid I think it’s only natural to think your parents have a skewed taste in music (and maybe a few other things)! Now that I’m older I’m glad I’ve taken time to revisit some of the music that I grew up listening to. While Gordie looks nothing like I imagined him (based on album covers that are older than me), he still had that unmistakable voice, though noticeably aged. It made me kinda nostalgic for my youth and an era that I didn’t even live in. It’s also amazing how much of that music I know so well, even if I haven’t heard it in over a decade. The Music of Our Youth would make a wicked mixtape theme…
Despite my crazy fatigue I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night. Needless to say I wasn’t happy to hear our alarm clock go off this morning. Nor was I glad to hear it the following three times. My wife hit the wrong button and went off to the shower. When it went off again (and ear-bleedingly loud), I was faced with the challenge of turning it off. The little image with this blog might not do justice for just how many buttons are on this contraption. There are buttons on the top, the face, and the display screen. I mashed a collection of them and popped the CD thing open and somehow the music stopped. Ten minutes later it was round two. In the scuffle the CD came out and the machine was on its side. It looked done. My wife entered the room for round three and found me crouched on the end of the bed having trashed the room to unplug every electrical outlet that could have something to do with the non-stop beeping.
This annoys me more as an awake designer than a sleeping bear. In the clocks defense, I never have to turn it off, and I likely haven’t touched the thing in over three months; but as an end user I shouldn’t have to refer to the schematics every time I need to turn one of the alarms off. Dashboards, power tools and alarm clocks should all be designed so intuitively that even the grouchiest sleep deprived lunatic can turn them off first try. Less is more.