Martin Edwards

Made this new motivational poster. #MotivationalPoster #Microsoft #WindowsUpdate

I previously shared a stunning live performance of Bomfunk MCs' "Freestyler" by The Dmitry Butenko #Orchestra. A Google search reveals astonishingly little about this young conductor from #Vladivostok; I guess a Russian-language query on Yandex would turn up a lot more. Here's another beauty. https://youtu.be/JaOgQQKG_Ls #EDM #crossover #Russia

Back in 1999, Venetian producer Cristiano Spiller released an instrumental track called Groovejet, presumably so-called because it features a prominent "jet effect" at various points. The distinct sound of a close passing jet comes from the varying time delay between the waves we hear directly from the engines and those reflected off the ground, plus of course Doppler shift. Early digital decks like the classic Pioneer CDJ-100S encouraged the use of the same phase difference technique as an effect in music. The following year, a vocal version of Groovejet became an international hit. From what I recall, the singer was largely uncredited and indeed unknown at the time: Sophie Ellis-Bextor. It wasn't until 2001 that she released her breakthrough singles Take Me Home and Murder on the Dancefloor. Groovejet also has a unique place in tech history, as Steven Levy recalled in a 2006 article for Wired: "In August [2001], the team [developing the iPod at Apple] finally got one of the physical prototypes to play a song. A group of people working late at night took turns listening on a set of headphones from someone's old Sony Walkman. That first song, by the way, was Spiller's 'Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)'." https://youtu.be/9mQ2MuDAKro #HouseMusic #MusicTech #Physics #iPod

@Lee_Holmes@infosec.exchange Nice, classically Microsoft cover design. Reminds me of the good old box and splash screen designs. Just missing the ultra-heavy type.

17 July is the one day of the year when the calendar #emoji is correct! The word emoji combines the Japanese e (絵, picture) + moji (文字, character) and dates back to the late 80s. Its similarity to the English "emotion" is just a coincidence. Nowadays, emoji are standardised by the Unicode Consortium, a Californian non-profit that has its roots in facilitating a universal digital representation of the world's writing systems. #Unicode doesn't specify exactly how emoji should look – so they're different on Android and Apple devices, for example – but it lists their names. The first major character set used in computing was #ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, published in 1963. Using 7 bits, it could represent 128 characters — more than enough for a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9 and common punctuation marks, but certainly indicative of a North American worldview. Later "extended" versions of ASCII doubled this to 256 possibilities, allowing for dozens of accented letters, characters like æ and ß, and symbols like © and ¾. And double-byte character sets like Shift JIS meant that Chinese, Korean and Japanese could be represented in full. But multiple standards existed, and it became just a bit too common to see ����. The answer was Unicode: a single, multi-byte character encoding standard for everyone. Plus emoji! #language #i18n

@martenson@mastodon.world @baldur@toot.cafe Yeah, Time Machine is fantastic. I wouldn't put it in that category though. My biggest frustrations with Apple and syncing are that there's almost never a "force sync now" function, and there's often no visibility into sync progress (or indeed whether any such background activity is taking place at all).

@W6KME@mastodon.radio @onreact@mas.to I see. Still, I'd posit that for anyone hearing this today, the fact that Placebo is actually a band is the main reason the joke works!

@onreact@mas.to @W6KME@mastodon.radio I was totally distracted by this detail too. In fact the joke reads much better if you remove the words "a band called The".

@khleedril@cyberplace.social @andypiper@macaw.social Granted HMRC opted to use it, but it's not an uncommon choice: isn't this GoTo's fault?

Saw a video by Wired about the little-known #AssistiveAccess feature on iPhone. Well, it was new to me, for sure. Looks excellent for some of my older customers. But the premise of the video was that Assistive Access can also be used to limit children's access to a set of allowed apps, with the parent or guardian's chosen configuration protected by a PIN. https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welcome/ios #iPhone #iOS #accessibility #OnlineSafety #ChildSafety

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io My CS degree at #OxfordBrookesUniversity from 2008–2012 included plenty of programming. I recall one module in which we had to create a system for scoring tennis using model–view–controller and the composite pattern. At least two web modules: one more frontend, the other PHP + MySQL. Made a game in Processing. So, I guess it depends on the particular degree.

Small moth on the wall in the office. Hope it doesn't end up in the computer. It's a popular #myth that the term #bug, in the realm of software, comes from a moment in 1947 when computing pioneer Grace Hopper attributed a problem with an electromechanical computer to a moth trapped in a relay. She famously taped the moth onto a page in the machine's logbook. In fact, this meaning of bug had been around at least as early as the 1870s, when Thomas Edison used it to describe "little faults and difficulties" in his inventions. Logbook photo courtesy of the US Naval History and Heritage Command, public domain. #SoftwareEngineering #WomenInTech #history

Scarlet tiger moth

@bloor@bloor.tw Thought you might like this parking meter I saw today that matches the subset of your interests {solar, avians}.

I keep seeing these depressing diagrams showing how city streets were cooler before we cut down all the trees, so I made this to show how much the AI rush has improved the climate in deserts. #ClimateCrisis #DataCenters #joke

#Deltron 3030 is the title track from an underrated #HipHop concept album released in 2000 by Dan the Automator (producer: Cornershop, #Gorillaz, Jamie Cullum), Del the Funky Homosapien (cousin of Ice Cube, vocals in Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz), and Canadian scratch DJ Kid Koala that tells the story of a #dystopian New World Order a century from now, with #SciFi themes. https://youtu.be/s7FxVSDLonY

@bloor@bloor.tw Visually reminds me of this! +1 for "definitively speculate".

@revk@toot.me.uk Dating, I believe, from 2008, I think this cartoon quaintly failed to predict the scale of the problem that was to come.

These #GenAI posters for local events are a massive turn-off. Right now I think I'd be more receptive to something in Comic Sans with disproportionately-resized 1990s clipart, screenshotted from Word complete with red wavy underlines.

Trying hard to recall the source of the lyric "I see a fish in the garden." Finally got Blue Monday by New Order — and it's actually "I see a ship in the harbour." Not bad.

#ThrowbackThursday Should I apologise for this? Maybe. Is it exactly 25 years since Don't Stop Movin' entered the chart at number 1? Definitely.

https://youtu.be/vm262cXxRrU

Managed to avoid a #ReformUK flyer through the door because I was out front trimming the bush.

#ThrowbackThursday Indian icon Asha Bhosle died this month at the grand age of 92, having performed more than 12,000 songs over eight decades as what Bollywood calls a playback singer — a vocalist whose pre-recorded singing is lip-synced by the actor. The Leicester band Cornershop had, of course, paid a great tribute to her in 1997 with Brimful of Asha. Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) loved the record and requested to remix it; released the following year, his version became an international hit and UK number 1, which NME would later rank second in "The 50 best remixes ever", saying it "does what the truly great remixes do – render you unable to enjoy the original." Check out the opening of Mary, Mary (1968) by The Monkees for the drum sample used in this remix.

https://youtu.be/5LBnMRWeV-E

#ThrowbackThursday Orville Burrell, better known as Shaggy, was born in Jamaica but moved aged 18 to New York, where he soon joined the US marines and went on to serve in Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War. He then turned his attention to music, releasing this international hit – along with It Wasn't Me – from his fifth album, Hot Shot, at the turn of the century. Sharing the vocals is Rayvon, who was born in Barbados but raised in Brooklyn. Angel is said to sample The Joker by Steve Miller Band; I'm not convinced it isn't a re-recording rather than a sample, but what do I know. The melody, meanwhile, comes from the chorus of "Angel of the Morning", a 1967 composition by American singer-songwriter Chip Taylor, who died last month aged 86. Find a lovely live performance of this here: https://youtu.be/CFcVaErgrVA

https://youtu.be/6Um0OSJUxlM

@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Oh it's maddening. If anyone reading this knows a good way to keep using a spreadsheet while complying with #MakingTaxDigital I'd love to know.

#ThrowbackThursday Formed in Melbourne in the late nineties, Electronic duo Madison Avenue released their only album in 2000, this lead single from which topped the chart in New Zealand and the UK. The main riff is sampled from an Italo disco record from 1981 called Ma quale idea: youtu.be/hg9gvz5n614 which itself sampled American R&B duo McFadden & Whitehead's 1979 hit Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now: youtu.be/i2FW1WJc0lg.

https://youtu.be/M1kEjj3Ej68

Recent connotations aside, I could totally get behind the idea of such annual celebrations of civil engineering as Bridge Day and Power Plant Day.

#ThrowbackThursday A January release with a smooth summer feeling, Lancashire trio LMC combined instantly-recognisable samples from U2's With or Without You with the opening lyrics to How Will I Know by Whitney Houston – and some excellent new arpeggios – to create their 2004 number one Take Me to the Clouds Above. The vocalist is Rachel McFarlane, who'd previously sung with N-Trance on the same Blackburn record label All Around the World. An especially warm remix here, which interestingly has been transposed up slightly from F♯ to G.

https://youtu.be/SKCmLW6ZDfE

@bloor@bloor.tw I thought you might be just the sort to appreciate reminiscing about the Netscape days with this Abingdon furniture restorer.

I'm pretty offended nowadays each time I finish putting together the village newsletter – the product of dozens of hours of work by dozens of people – open the final PDF for a quick check, and have #Acrobat suggest "This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary using #AI Assistant." I think humankind needs to have some pretty serious conversations about where we're headed with this technology.

#ThrowbackThursday Future Islands hail from Maryland but released their breakthrough fourth album on British label 4AD in 2014. Frontman Samuel T. Herring stunned US talk show host David Letterman with his emotive physical as well as vocal performance of the lead single, Seasons (Waiting on You), in March that year.

https://youtu.be/upPl9mZW_zw

Keep forgetting to cancel my #Labour Party membership from when Corbyn was leader. It's worse than that time I joined a gym and went once but kept paying for twelve months.

#ThrowbackThursday 25 years ago this week, Guillaume Atlan released Starlight under his stage name The Supermen Lovers. In case you've ever wondered if the main riff was his own creation: of course not! This is French house! It's from a 1978 record called The Rock by American disco project East Coast. Vocals on Starlight come from fellow Frenchman Mani Hoffman and Israeli singer Onili, who was living in Paris at the time. What you've probably not heard is this 2025 version with Californian band OneRepublic — and they even reworked the animation!

https://youtu.be/U5A-vrKNQKs

This Italian record from 2002 has suddenly become popular because of TikTok or something like Keir Starmer apparently used it in a video or something. To be honest I don't know what to believe any more. Anyway, point being, it's a banger and has obviously stood the test of time. The guitar riff is lifted from a 1988 song called Streets of Your Town by Brisbane indie rockers The Go-Betweens, while additional unexpected writing credits are Paul and Linda McCartney because the chorus borrows lyrics from Wings' 1975 hit Listen to What the Man Said.

https://youtu.be/xlmJZOxb-Nk

#ThrowbackThursday British singer-songwriter Nerina Pallot has arguably never been mainstream: this Iraq War-inspired record remains her highest-charting single to date, reaching number 14 in 2006. The official video pulls off a serious portrayal of modern conflict in a humorous setting, directed by the prolific Marc Klasfeld whose portfolio is worth viewing at marcklasfeld.com.

https://youtu.be/kKTCScoUFWk

The subject is no laughing matter, but this is one of the funniest article openings I've ever read.

@coreyspowell Aww, the tail dragging along! The pet rats I had were not fussy about their tails being handled – or my occasional, futile attempts to make them a bit cleaner – though they did use them for balance and grip, and occasionally shook them with excitement or contentment, I think.