For some reason I appear to be watching/listening to drum solos on YouTube this evening.
This is one of my favourites so far. It’s by Slayer and Grip Inc. drummer Dave Lombardo. I am especially impressed by his double kick-drum. I’m sure he can move his legs faster than I can move my arms!
Here’s a fun application: C64 yourself.
Drop an image (PNG or JPG up to 2 MB in size) onto the website and it will convert it to a Commodore 64-8-bit style image. It has all sorts of retro loader-screen loveliness while it does it.
You can then save the image in three resolutions: 320 x 200, 640 x 400 or 1024 x 800.
This is a really helpful Web resource that I’ve needed to use from time to time.
Sometimes you can’t access a website because it’s genuinely down. Sometimes you can’t access a website because there is something wrong with your internet service provider’s (ISP’s) DNS server, meaning that your PC isn’t given the correct address to locate the website. Sometimes you can’t access a website because someone, somewhere needs to switch off the internet and then switch it back on again.
That’s where www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com comes in. It checks to see if it’s down for everyone else or just you.
And that’s it.
As you can see from the result…
When I arrived home this evening Reuben wanted ‘up’. Initially ‘up’ into my arms but then ‘up’ onto the car roof. Who was I to deny his wishes?
I think every car needs a Reuben Roof Accessory™. It would certainly prevent you from speeding!
Fast forward twenty minutes and both Reuben and Joshua were on my desk with a camera each. Thank goodness for digital cameras: I hate to think how many 35mm films we’d have gone through by now!
They love taking photos, and I love taking photos of them taking photos.
I love coming home in the evenings to Reuben, Joshua and Isaac (who was already in bed when we were messing about with the cameras).
A couple of years ago a friend-of-a-friend, a photographer, sent me a handful of promo CDs. He’d picked them up on various photo assignments and thought that I might like to hear them. In many cases he already had the albums.
If you’ve never seen a promo CD, they are very much like the finished article except that the artwork is cut down to a cardboard sleeve and the songs are split up across 99 tracks.
That makes it very difficult to rip them to MP3. Not impossible, but it certainly makes you think twice: do you really want to spend the next three days splicing together 99 tracks to reconstruct the original 11 tracks?
I thought not.
I didn’t want to do it either so I bought three of the albums, and passed a few of the others on to someone else. I bought:
In the Talmud, a record of rabbinic discussions about ethics, law, philosophy, customs and history dating from between 200 and 500 CE, Samael was an important archangel, an accuser, seducer and destroyer. In Jewish lore seemingly one of his most important roles was that of angel of death. Importantly, however, he remained one of the Lord’s angels despite his penchant for wanting men to do evil.
Samael is also the name of a Swiss metal band, formed in 1987 in Sion, variously labelled as industrial metal, (second wave of) black metal, industrial black metal, symphonic metal, and electronic. And I rather like their variety of syncopated back beats and over-driven keyboards!
The YouTube video above is the opening track from their new album Lux Mundi.