Just a short ‘katsup’ note.  I’m so busy with SpinFlow related projects that I have little time for blogging.  Things are definitely starting to spin and flow with respect to our Outhink sponsored projects.

I had a great interview with Metrov on friday.  He’s a multi-talented and insightful digital artist living in Goleta, California.  He graciously invited me over to his studio and we had an interesting conversation about his work and moving digital media.  I’m putting together a complete writeup for SpinFlow.

I’ve also been trying to get back into the groove with Internet Archive Tonight and have been adding significantly to the playlists at WebJay.org.  Check out the new Lounge playlist.

Speaking of music, hop over to Hideout for a great source of legal tunes.  Hideout is a radio show with "drops of 30 minutes of music featuring selections made by Brazilian DJs".  Don’t expect too much Samba here, the last show highlights some hot rock and roll bands.  This is a nice Blogger site and you can use your own favorite media player or the embedded flash one if you are player-less.

I took a walk with Alicia yesterday in the Ventura River Preserve and just got so fired up by all the sounds that I have started to play more with my old Olympus D1000 digital recorder so that I can start an "Ojai Sites and Sounds" weblog (anyone want to help?) where people can visit to just take a break and listen to birds, horses, streams, parades, children’s laughter, etc.  Click the picture of horseback rider to view a Flash-based slideshow of the pics.

The good news is that the D1000 seems like a great little portable recording device.  Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a driver for the Olympus CA1 PCMCIA flash card reader that works with Win2K (this is weird, as I have another, similar, reader for my camera and old pda flash cards that works fine without installing any special drivers).  Oh well, I can always go from recorder’s mono headphone out to a computer’s stereo line in.  Joy.  Sort of defeats the point of capturing things digitally.  Anyone know how I can make Win2K recognize the Olympus CA1 flash card reader?  Does it work under XP?  I guess I can look into buying a new reader that handles flash memory cards and the newer and smaller SD ones used in my new iPAQ pda/phone.

Ok, back to work.  I have aggregators to tame and lots of video tasks to get to (I learned how to do pic-in-pic and simple text videos in Quicktime last night - fun, but it takes way too much time from my programming).  I need a 40 hour day, not week. 

I am starting to investigate several interesting issues with the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.  I use it for both email and RSS newsfeed aggregation.  I also use it to pre-sort new items for my Internet Archive Tonight playlists over on WebJay.org (Matt May at staccatomusic.org says "audition").

The first issue is to investigate some possible bugs related to duplicate channels in the newsfeed tree (you can see them if you use the t-bird OPML import/export add-in for the manage subscriptions dialog).

The second issue is to see if we can further automate the "audition" process.  I can well attest that building playlists from archive.org postings can be a very labor intensive process and Matt mentioned this too.

To this end, I have been over at MozDev studying how T-bird plug-ins work.  More on all this later; this is just a status report.

Is anyone else doing these sorts of things?  Any good tips on creating t-bird plug-ins?

With the launch of ourmedia.org, the amount of new submissions to the Internet Archive has gone up a little and there is a bit more to sift through.  Unfortunately, most of these new submissions are generally not quite as interesting as the material submitted to the other IA collections (except for the photos) and so a little help in sorting the wheat from the chaff would be welcomed. 

One solution that I found is to pre-sort the Internet Archive’s new submissions newsfeed using Mozilla Thunderbird’s Message Filters feature.  I first set up a filter to check if the body of the message contains "collection:" and "ourmedia".  This filters out the ourmedia submissions to a separate folder that I have set up.

I also noticed that some newsfeed items result in messages that have a "Message-Id" header (shown as "Website" in the Thunderbird Message Header) that contains URLs such as the following:

http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=audio &identifier=exp012

http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=Image &identifier=DavidWallaceSailsDSC03613tweakedagainjpg

http://www.archive.org/details-db.php ?mediatype=movies &identifier=nokturnal-jamaica

So I look for "mediatype=audio", "mediatype=movies" or "mediatype=Image" to sort items into folders named "IA Audio", "IA Movies" and "IA Images".  You need to add the "Message-Id" message header using the customize option at the bottom of the message field pull-down in the Filter Rules dialog that is accessible from the "New…" and "Edit…" buttons on Tools | Message Filters dialog.

One can also search for keywords that indicate genre: ambient, noise, trance, indie, pop, rock, etc.

With filters like these setup, it is easy to pre-sort the new submissions into folders that are easy to work with (i.e., I can do all the new Ambient at once).  This also makes collaboration with other reviewers easier (anyone want to take on the Techno/Trance playlist?).

As always, all the interesting new submissions we find are added to our playlists at WebJay.

Note: our first playlist, "Promises, Promises" has been played 2877 times at the time of this posting.  Wow!

Here’s a quick and cool little video of a 3D face mask that I found tonight on the Internet Archive.  Click the picture to view the movie or click on the link below for the complete IA details page.

Personality and identity is seen on the background of the age of
digital reproduction/manipulation and the central issue in today’s
science: genetic modifications.

A 3D scanner was used at Eastman Dental Institute for Oral Health Care
Sciences University College London for capturing face data. Programmed
average heads were rendered by using the database of the Institute. The
faces you see, do not exist like this for real (…what is real?) The
data of the face scans has just been used like a surface, modelled onto
someone else’s scull (the artists’ sculls).

Link: Program Details for (Remote) Mind - The Strangers are still me. (extract).