:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Thursday, April 15, 2004 ::

Photo recognition software gives location
"You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, photograph the nearest building and press send. For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination. That, at least, is what two researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK hope their software will one day be used for."
Look at those images they demoed it with, they even have the same cars parked in front of the buildings! Good luck to 'em!

:: Dan 15.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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Real profits from play money

Masters of computing: How the IBM System/360 revolutionised computing
History of IBM (no mention of the alleged Nazi link)

:: Dan 15.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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Mobile Bristol have created a 34 zone romining audio experience of the 1831 Queens Square Riots. You can now go to Queens Square in Bristol, put on the GPS backpack(!)/WiFi/headphone contraption and walk around the square listening to accounts of the incident from different perspectives. Beeb news story here.

:: Dan 15.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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There's a Deathchant Mix up on the Peel show website and a fairly uninformative look at the label here.
Official site at deathchant.com
Buy Deathchant records at The Hard Store

:: Dan 15.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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Circuit Bending on 'Newsround'!
Stream
Text
And someone has even been nice enough to encode an MP3
Let's hear it for the next generation of mangled-electronics-noise musicians.

:: Dan 14.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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"It doesn't matter if you listen to opera, classical or rave - it's the speed of the beat that counts"
Drivers warned about loud music
And again

:: Dan 14.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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New film review added to reviews page:
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine

:: Dan 14.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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Tells of sticky horror. NTK brought "The Molasses Disaster of January 15, 1919" to my attention (although it reads like a spoof). Which spurred my curiosity to look up what exactly molasses actually is, having wondered every time I've read the ingredients on a bottle of brown sauce and assumed it was some sort of sugar type thing. Delia explains a bit more, if you can bare her smug face staring out from the page at you.

:: Dan 13.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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I hope everyone had a good Easter. Now on with the Blog.

Micro-Film Review (do you see what I did there?)
Shaun of the Dead:
Hilarious zom-rom-com from the makers of Spaced. Contains some great concepts and some brilliant set pieces but misses a lot of the cleaver dialogue you would expect. Some reviews refer to its brilliant one liners but in my opinion these are almost completely missing. The most memorable line in it is when Shaun is on the phone to his mother and asks her if she was hurt when some zombies attacked, "They were a bit... um... bitey," is her brilliantly understated response. Lots of cameos from the leading lights of British sitcom, but in all focuses too much on the rom-com and not enough on the zom.

Via g3rm:
UK Circuit Benders
...and...
Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) contributes to the countless millions of column inches generated about Kurt Cobain at the tenth anniversary of his death. No not worthy in itself but I love this quote from it:
"We were in a Brooklyn basement full of artists and sound-poets gathered to watch musicians throw down extreme noise improvisation. One performer played records with two customized tone arms on his turntable; the discs broke and scratched, creating shards of hyperfractured beat play. He was followed by a quartet of young women scraping metal files across amplified coils mixed through junk electronics. I was to perform a spontaneous guitar/amp feedback piece with a stand-up bass player on loan from his teaching post at Berklee College of Music and a free jazz percussionist who had traversed through New York's downtown underground in the 60's. Not your typical night of alternative rock."
Sounds great to me!

:: Dan 13.4.04 [Arc]    ::
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