New Release: détournement

Just posted a collection of old material on bandcamp. Sample-based productions that have been hanging around on my computers for the last 10 years or so. Please enjoy and share.

Favorite Music from 2010

Another list. I look forward to skimming through others’ lists to see what I missed or dismissed too easily in 2010 or what never made it to my ears.

My picks, in alphabetical order:

Akira Rabelais – Caduceus
The latest from Akira Rabelais delves further into his finely textured soundworld. Having built a delicate and detailed sonic vocabulary since the 1990s, this composer continues to impress me with his skilled digital manipulations. Finely tuned grit.

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
Still living with this one… I immediately liked about half of the album while the rest took time to grow on me.
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Music faves from 2009

It seems that 2009 is the year when I shifted my attention back to rock and pop music. Dubstep still holds my attention but not to the extent that it did back in 2006 when it took over my brain. Here are the things I enjoyed most in 2009, in no particular order.

Best Albums

XXThe XX – XX
Thanks to my friend, Tony, who first mentioned this band to me. The XX are a young bunch who make lean pop music consisting of boy/girl vocals, hand-played drum machines and perfectly placed guitar lines. This album quickly became a habit.

The XX – Islands:

The XX – Night Time:
The XX – VCR:
Continue reading “Music faves from 2009”

Solution to “display:table-row” causing pain and suffering with IE

I recently came up against a situation where I wanted to add rows to a table via javascript.

Not a problem with jQuery, EXCEPT that my table rows were being added with ‘style=”display:block”‘.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in Firefox the row was being appended to the table but it looked all scrunched into the first cell like so:

borkedtablerow

OK, fine. Let’s give it a display property of “table-row.” That should work, right? Yes, it works here but not in IE. IE hates this, in fact. IE wants to get a display of “block.”

The solution turns out to be to set the display value to an empty string. Then, each browser will give the row its default value and everyone is happy.

source: http://cormacscode.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/show-hide-table-row-in-firefox-versus-ie/

Google Reader Beautification: Helvetireader

helvetireaderSo crisp and clean!

I have been a Google Reader for a good while now and I think it is a very fine web application. It does what I expect it to do and it does it well. It is utilitarian. It is useful. I use it daily.

But now, I find it even more enjoyable to use. Two greasemonkey scripts have turned my standard Reader interface into something beautiful and even more useable (imho).

Behold:
Helvetireader
+
Favicons for Google Reader

There are even instructions for using the scripts with Fluid. If you are not familiar with Fluid, it is a utility for creating site-specific browsers based on Safari (WebKit). Get familiar. You’ll like it.

So go, make your Reader prettier (and subscribe to this blog’s feed).

Found it!

I love when I find something that I forgot that I was looking for…

I used to search for this song at every record store I visited from around 1996-2000. It was not a new song at the time, but I really wanted it on 7-inch. Amoeba Records in San Francisco had a corner filled with shelves which were filled with long boxes of Jamaican singles and I would flip blindly through those records, not really knowing much about most of them.

I never found the record.

But today I stumbled on the song again in mp3 form! An old old itch has finally been scratched.

Simpleton – Coca Cola Shape