Evonity.org

Filesharing oddity on WinXP 64 Pro

Ben — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:45:00 +0000

I just spent hours making my own Windows XP 64 bit PC show up in my own workgroup and access shared folders. If I had some basic knowledge off Windows networks, I would have known that I had to turn on the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service first. I assume that this service is turned on by default in Windows XP 32 bit, but not in the 64 version. Or has it something to do with differences between Home and Professional distributions (comment if you know the answer)? Anyway: I eventually solved it by using the Windows Networks Problem Solver.

The Perfect Nanny shredded and glued together

Ben — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:43:00 +0000

The Perfect Nanny, sung by Karen Dotrice and Mathew Garber (Jane and Michael Banks) Is probably my favorite song from Mary Poppins. If it isn’t, than the ingeniously edited light house version (it actually became a whole new song) by Pogo most certainly is. It goes by the title Expialidocious and you really should give it a listen. At the end of the song you can even hear the delightful voice of Julie Andrews.

Enough good music to listen to every song once

Ben — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:41:00 +0000

Even now that I’ve departed from The Sixtyone there’s still too much great music out there in the digital cloud. With The Hype Machine as my lookout on almost every music blog that means something in the indie music industry, there’s still enough good music to listen to every song just once. If somebody would pay me, I could tune in to the eternal music stream all day. But even than I had to miss out on a lot of heart tearing melodies, because many songs are just too good to listen to once. We just have to try to live with the thought that the best music exists without ever being heard by us.

Listen to: Lonely Dear - Airport Surroundings

Taxi Taxi!

Ben — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:54:38 +0000

Taxi Taxi! - More Childish Than In A Long Time was the first song I heard from Taxi Taxi! from Sweden. Everything The devil has the best tuna has to say about them is true, although I don’t think their voices sound as immaculate as Simon & Garfunkel. If they did, I probably wouldn’t have liked this song that much.

An intelligent receiver

Ben — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:28:50 +0000

I suppose that what you’re trying to tell me, is that you are in fact working on some kind of virtual receiver that you can tune to whatever music you want to hear. Not just to a certain style, but to any song you like in whatever genre available. A tuner that pulls the right content (audio, video, additional info lyrics - and even cross links to whatever music you think is related - at your demand . If this is correct, then I am glad I met you, because that’s exactly the tuner I’m looking for. Even more if it can also make me forget that there’s so much more to enjoy.

A social music sharing site like T61 could have been a great source for such a receiver. They connect people and their tastes and it’s just too bad that (up to this day) they never really utilized this potential. I tell you, if I were a programmer as good as tptb… but nuf said about T61.

What I miss in your story are thoughts on socializing with other music lovers and artists. I’m not sure if this is something of any real value, but it’s definitely something I care about. It’s fun to give and receive tips for new artists and songs, or get personally informed by artists, when they have new material up. The stuff we do on Plurk so to speak. Don’t you think that ‘our’ intelligent radio should also offer this feature? Or even more, that this radio’s intelligence depends on it?

Shouldn’t the perfect music app not integrate the best parts of sites like last.fm, hypem, plurk, reverbnation and perhaps even T61?

A month without The Sixtyone

Ben — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:44:51 +0000

A month without The Sixtyone. Did I miss it? Yes, I did! I especially missed the thrill of running into great new music by hardly known bands. I also missed being close to artists, as I used to be at t61. I miss the game, but i already did long before I stopped gaming. And I miss fellow t61′ers. I know some of them are here, but it’s not the same.

So should I return to t61?

I don’t think so. At first everything will be ok, but after a while the constantly changing features will start to frustrate me again. On a bright site: I spend more time on doing my work, which is smart since I have a lot to accomplish.

Fredo Viola

Ben — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:45:59 +0000

Although it’s the first time I’ve listened to Fredo Viola, he’s certainly not all new at the online music scene. According to his bio (link at the bottom of this story) he already had his first cyberspace success in 2004. In that year one of his early songs (The Sad Song) had been licensed for The Manchurian Candidate.

Apart from this song, the Fairtilizer player below also features the following songs: Red States, Red States Vaccaro Mix, The Turn (A Pagan Lament) and Our Lips Are Sealed (The Go-Go’s cover). More songs are amongst others on his Fairtylizer account. The songs come from either the The Sad Song (February 2008) and Red States (December 2008) EP or the also in December 2009 published full album The Turn. Check Fredo Viola’s news page for availability.

Fredo Viola was born in the UK but raised in the US. That’s where he made his fabulous vocal music. On the contrary to what you might think, he doesn’t have a choir a la The King’s Singers behind him. He does all A Cappella singing by himself, which he is able to because of his boy choir experience.

He also has a beautiful designed website. According to Wikipedia, he’s a multi media artist, so he most likely did the design himself. It’s definitely worth a visit.

It’s underneath

Ben — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 07:01:39 +0000

For my friends at Plurk

Between the bump on a song and the points added to a listener’s account, some statistical and logical calculation needs to be made. The numbers used and the formula’s processed are well kept secrets and thus form a challenge to the code breaking part of the T61 community. Some parameters are obvious. Think of listener level, artist level, number of bumps already received, popularity of a genre etc. But overall the process between bumping and point gain is far from transparent - some would say it is unfair. Even a look under the hood of different T61 pages won’t change that, but the information beneath the surface of what’s visible is still very interesting. Interesting enough to have a look at it.

Valuable information is available in a piece of code on every page. To study the code you need to view the page in the source viewer of the browser. In Firefox you choose Page source in the View menu. In Internet Explorer 7 you find it behind the Page button in the toolbar. If you don’t know how to find it in your browser, just read the manual. The code to look for is at the bottom of the page. After you’ve opened any T61 page in the source viewer, scroll down the 2000 or so lines of code, until you arrive at either on of the next two lines: