Archive for July, 2009

Full list of AWM cuts

Regen.net has the full list of Advantage West Midlands projects that will see major cuts. Creative projects and creative-employment projects cut include: Jewellery Quarter Joint Venture Rotunda LED Art Gallery The Innovation and Design Centre Black Country Living Museum – 1930’s High Street Business Brokers for High Growth (North Staffordshire) Regional Advantage Creative Fund – […]

Birmingham Film and Video Workshop to be documented

Birmingham’s Vivid has just had funding on the back of their on-now exhibition called Participation (ends tomorrow) which is about an aspect of the late history of the British left… “the emergence of new film forms, radical politics and practices, led by the British [video] workshop movement in the 1980s”. A DVD and website will […]

Life-sized Mousetrap

Some enterprising lads in Swindon have built a life-sized working Mousetrap game (video)…

BrindleyPlace vs. The Custard Factory

BrindleyPlace vs. The Custard Factory. No, not a new PopCap game, apparently — but rather a description of what is said to be the current face-off among the public-sector fixers in Brum, as the pot of cash to do Big Things in the city centre shrinks. The new Big Cat Group blog summarises a split […]

Shatter soundtrack

Mmm, fresh listening for the monsoon season. Yes, it’s more retro electro-tastic space-pop / 8-bit game music. Just released and free online, although not via Spotify… Shatter : Official Videogame Soundtrack (2009) by Jeramiah Ross aka Module. (Full streaming album, no ads) I’m now on my third play-through. Excellent. Outstanding track: “Amethyst Caverns”.

“i can haz go shoppin?”

A very cheap catwalker… Although you do need a willing kittee…

Changes at Intute

The UK academic service Intute has had a redesign… Very nice it looks, too. But, unfortunately, the redesign has broken a variety of vital arts & humanities links. Below are the changes, if you’ve been linking via your Web pages to the “Latest Additions” on Intute:— Direct links: Was: …/artsandhumanities/latest.html Is now split into five: […]

Search Hunt

Search. It’s just a game to Microsoft… Not quite as gripping as the sublime Plants vs. Zombies (2009) or Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (2009) (both of which I’ve recently beaten, purely in the interest of teaching games in higher education you understand /heh/). But Microsoft’s Page Hunt has some rough-edged charm, and they […]

8-Bit Operators

8-Bit Operators : The Music Of Kraftwerk Performed On 8-Bit Video Game Systems (Spotify playlist) Outstanding track: “Tanzmuzik” interpreted by Herbert Wiexelbaum.

How to export a text playlist listing from Spotify

How to export a plain-text playlist listing from the Spotify client: No-one seems to be able to figure out how to copy the exact full listing (with timings and source album titles), so I made a tutorial… 1. Select (highlight) the top track by clicking on it. Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard, […]

Pay-per Press

Uh oh, here we go… the brave last stand of the newspapers is to be led by /sound a flourish of trumpets!/ the Associated Press with embedded DRM. Yeah. “The AP said that the [tracking] registry will utilize a microformat “wrapper” to encapsulate AP and member content. The system… “includes a digital permissions framework that […]

Space Patrol : the rise of early British electropop

My first attempt at a Spotify compilation… Space Patrol : the rise of early British electropop. (Click the link to load/play the playlist). The early evolution of the British electropop sound, presented in chronological date order over the seminal years from 1977 until 1983. This compilation doesn’t cover the rush of chart synthpop-ettes who followed. […]

Up the caff

A new Flickr group for pictures of West Midlands cafes.

Search across Spotify playlist websites

As Spotify consigns iTunes to the bin, I thought it would be a good idea to make a search-engine to power a Firefox addon — it searches across multiple Spotify listings websites (16 currently), looking for themed Spotify playlists.        If you get too much cruft from a single keyword, you can use intitle:keyword and […]

An Endless Supply

More Canals than Venice blog brings news of a new Birmingham steampunk that can sit comfortably alongside the likes of Eccentric City on the rack. It’s called An Endless Supply… Three issues are online for free.

AREA Magazine

Do we need yet another arts/cultural listings service? Well, we’ve got one — in the shape of Fused magazine’s new AREA Magazine [delinked, Feb 2012 – now a spam site]… “This is the debut issue of AREA Magazine that covers July and August 09. We decided to combine the two months as there isn’t a […]

West Midlands: Fit for the Future?

A free ten-chapter ebook has just been launched. West Midlands: Fit for the Future? Positioning The Region For Economic Recovery is about… “the future prosperity of the West Midlands, rather than on the effects of the recession, and explores the region’s ability to maximise its potential as it moves out of the downturn.” Chapters 3 […]

Not A Crime @ Flickr

The new ‘Not A Crime’ group on Flickr is posting self-portraits of photographers holding a “I am Not a Terrorist” or “Not a Crime” sign.

Typographics Horizons

One for the diary. Typographics Horizons will be a one-day symposium at The Birmingham Institute of Art & Design (BIAD), on the 18th Nov 09.

Spore2Maya

Not only does the recent Spore patch remove copy protection, it also lets you export your models to Maya… “The exported creations include normal, diffuse and specular maps, and are fully rigged and weighted, so you can pose them too,”