ricardocabellov5.5

Once again, Apple is kicking the ass of Microsoft in their own Platform. I'm talking about Video Players.

For years Mac (David Notario) was always complaining about Quicktime because wasn't really an open format that you could play with another player and he was always defending .wm9. In fact, when we (he) did all the videos of all the threepixels demos, he didn't want to save them as .mov mainly because that.

But, as you can see, .mov is now a very used video format in for anything. In xplsv.tv for example 90% of all the content is in Quicktime, looks like everyone using mac or After Effects (win or mac) always export as quicktime. And I say "thanks god!". Whenever you try to see a video streamed in a website using the shitty Windows Media Player I get quite angry, my conection sometimes isn't fast enough and the video stops.. and says streaming... 20% 45% 76%... that sucks. I can understand that they do that with a TV stream, but not with a video! Quicktime instead saves all the video information, and you can play it without any stops whenever you want. Somehow, the quicktime player that is used for online files looks more profesional than the shitty windows media player.

Some months ago they released Quicktime 7 with the new HD technology (H.264). This simply rocks! As we have finally internet at home and one of the firsts things I did was to try the speed of it watching a lot of Movie Trailers in HD. And where else to check trailers at this resolution better than Apple Trailers? Again, a very clever move by Apple. So, what I was actually doing was watching all the trailers at 1080p definition. This means 1920x1080 pixels. So I was watching almost in realtime Trailers from internet at 1920x1080 (filling for first time totally my screen (1920x1200)) without resizing anything. Isn't that impressive?! I was even able to see a lot of bad texture mapping in Ice Age 2.

Something I really hated is that I'm not able to download Quicktime alone now, I have to download it with iTunes which I really hate (tho I'm starting to find usefull (the shop for CD previews and because we have some airtports at Spring which can connect directly to some speakers and with iTunes in your computer send the music to play in the speakers).

Talking about the technology, definitelly this has been a very big step that will really change a lot of things from now on. The PAL resolution is just starting the final days now. And again, thanks god! as I went the other day to a Dixons shop, where they had all those super screens and they were just doing a very crap interpolation of the PAL signal. The texture was so disgusting.

Btw, meanwhile writing this post I realized that Microsoft is working in this technology as well but they have the links to an EXE that you have to download and it's actually a zip, unzip and play.. Very useful, isn't it? :D MICROSOFT! LOSERS!!!

Here is a screenshot of my desktop so you can understand easier what I'm talking about.

r08028 - Cath the TechGoblin.mp3
HardTechno
I had that one started from long time ago, I had the idea of playing with random cartoon sounds on it, as there are not too many clown/funny hardtechno tunes out there. The final tune reminded me to Skaven's old track 'Cath the goblin'.

r08028 - Team3670.mp3
Bigbeat/Joke
This week the two design teams at Spring Digital just merged in only one and the mix inspired me that tune. It does kind of show the new sounds I hear now ;)

Enjoy!

The guys of FOEM just released a new 3CD compilation of some of the best underground musics out there!

CD 1: BigBeat, Breaks, IDM, Ambient
CD 2: Electro, House, Techno, Minimal
CD 3: Hardtechno

Download it here

Do you remember Konfabulator? It was a nice program. If i'm not wrong Apple ripped off the idea for his OS. This piece of software had a big boom when Yahoo! decided to buy it and making it free. That was very nice 4 months. But yesterday Yahoo! finalized the process of convert the software. And guess what?! The tool was showing a popup saying that the version 3.0 was ready to download. I was looking on the website to see what they did for this new version, but there was no information on the website (that btw was really slow). So somehow I decided to download it and try it today. It's not Konfabulator anymore, now it's Yahoo! Widgets. That's alright I can understand it, but I won't have a program that crashes (Konfabulator never crashed before) and asks for silly questions and tries to change the default website in my browser for Yahoo!'s one. That's LAME!

I was thinking those months about the idea of writting all my detailed experience about moving to London. Mainly because there is a lot of people that always ask me about the same things. And a post (or some of them) explaining everything will help.

So the question for you is, in which language should I write it? Spanish of English? Before answering, please think that, this is not only to encourage spaniards to move to other countries, there will be some english friends that main want to read it.

You can give your opinion by adding a comment here, or letting me know by MSN or any other way, you know how to reach me :)

The first mission after I decided to move to London 2 years ago was to find a permanent job. It took me a while, as I had a really poor english level. After 4 months I got the first job (freelance), and after 1year I got the permanent job I was dreaming on. That fact acomplished the first mission.

I guess the second mission then was to get a property here. I've spent just one year renting a flat in Notting Hill, we have been paying the funny number of £1000 a month just for the rent, 250.000 of the old spanish pts. Yes, life here is expensive, but hey! we are paid with the same level in our jobs. As you know, I've booked a trip to USA as soon as I realized that I had a lot of free days left at Spring. But that was quite a bad idea, as some weeks later, the landlor of the flat didn't want to continue the contract with us for one more year, so we had to leave the flat in 12th December. I booked my holidays for 25th of November to 10th of December, so, from the beginning I knew that wasn't going to happen. Mainly because we decided to BUY a property this time.

We've been looking to some properties during the year, checking the offer and all that, and days after we decided to buy a property I found quite a nice one, the same day I was checking the property (very close to Victoria station, on the side of the Westminster Cathedral) and days after we started the process. It has been quite an stressful process, talking with solicitors, with the bank, mortgage advisors.. and all that. I thought I was not going to be ready for that but somehow we did it quite well. We had some problems doing the process but looks like everything went OK. We started in a very big confusion and we now know exactly what we need to do if we want to buy another property.

I really want to thank to my father as he had a lot of patience explaining everything and checking that everything was going alright. For me was painful to translate all the new terms to spanish so he undertood everything, and also at some point we had to translate big forms so he was able to full them (kudos to Sole for doing that). A shame those forms were useless.

So, the last friday, 25th of November, my plane to New York was departing meanwhile I was finally signing the contract to get the flat. That week was perhaps the worst one, as the bank had to do the survey, that means that if they find something wrong, the bank is not going to let us the money and all the money that we already spent were not going to be back. So, we went to the solicitor friday morning (my first day of holidays) and did all the signature, then I went to walk a little bit to the are of Chinatown and bought the book from banksy and also iCon Steve Jobs, checked the movies from prince charles cinema, bought a new head (and happy) waving toy (it actually makes you feel better :D), and after that as it was quite cool (2°C) I went home and went to sleep. On the afternoon somebody was calling me, and I woke up, I had a message on the answer machine that I wasn't able to understand after replaying it 5+ times. It was from the solicitor, it was short and with a kind of happy mood, so I thought that everything went ok. Minutes later, the Estate agent called me to congratulate. So that was the confirmation, the flat is ours! Finally.

The solicitor told us that we will have the keys for the flat next thurday (1st of December), maybe Friday. So, by now i'm just waiting to arrive this day playing all the games I had in queue (quake 4, pes5, most wanted, black&white 2...) and also feeling that my laptop is already crap :'( as the games are a quite slow. I still don't know how we are going to do the removal stuff. But well, that is going to be interesting.

So looks like with this, the second mission here is also acomplished (I wonder which one should be now the third mission, I'll let you know as soon as I know :D). As in any other place we will have to keep paying for the flat for 20 years.. but well, nothing is given for free.

Also, as I do have 2 weeks os holidays I'm doing a list of all the stuff I had to do, probably I will do like 15% of everything in the list (a lot of stuff really).. but hey.. holidays!! o/

I'm adding FCKeditor to my admin system... this is just a test..

Looks like everything works quite smoothly. Writing a post will be less painful from now on.

These weeks I had to bring my laptop to Spring, because I needed to sincronize a kind of animation I'm doing, and my laptop was more useful and had more tools that my computer at work.

One of the days I just forgot my Wacom, so I had to change the one I got at work all the time between the laptop and the desktop. But I get tired of it on the 5 change or so, that was when I just remembered something about one app Carl Gaywood talk me about. I thought he said it was an app only for mac, but I did a little bit of search in google with a query like "share the keyboard and mouse between two computers", and luckily the answer was on the 2nd result.

The answer is just Synergy. With that free application, you can share one mouse within 2 or 100 computers. You need to install it in all the computers, and run it in only one as a server. And you will say, why didn't you used VNC instead? Well, with that program, the only information you have to send is the mouse position, and it works quite easily, when you move the mouse to any of the limits of the screen, if you configured that the screen of the other computer is going to be next to it, well, then the mouse just appears on that screen. This works with multimonitors as well :D. So you could have like 5 computers with 2 screen booths and configure it so you share the same mouse with all the screens. It was like having 3 screens in the same computer.

Ovbiously you cannot copy and paste things from one computer to another like dragging a file, but would be cool if they support that in a version 3.

It's really a nice tool.

It really took me so long, almost 40 years later.. Some days ago I watched the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, I was quite surprised that almost everybody that worked with him finished that angry with him. Also I quite liked some of the shots about 2001, so the next thing was downloading the other movies he did. I already watched Clockwork Orange and Eyes wide shut, both of them were great, but after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey I don't understand how come Clockwork Orange was the one everybody was talking about.. (Well, I guess I can understand it, it's just provocative, but not that much.. )

2001: A Space Odyssey.. you know the soundtrack, you probably have seen some scenes of it, but I'm sure not everybody seen it, or atleast from the beginning to the end. It's awesome, some of the scenes are just great, I'm still wondering how the fuck they did it, some gravitation stuff. And obviously, every old movie that tried to guess how the future was going to look like, usually looks quite weird and oldish, but in that case some of the scenes still look quite modern. Even the design of the eye of the computer is exactly the same shape that the ipod shuffle does have. But Apple is not the one that get inspired, Koyaanisqatsi, Memories and hundreds of other ones had been inspired by that one (as it's easy to see).

As you can see, I finished quite shocked, but I was even more shocked when I went (after the movie) to the profile on imdb, and realized that the movie was done on 1968. Very depressing :'(